Clostridium Botulinum
by madasmonty
Summary: "Botulism: A sometimes fatal disease which affects the central nervous system producing difficulty in swallowing, visual disturbances, and paralysis: often fatal." The childhood of Jim Moriarty. Multi-chaptered. Canon.
1. 5 September 1984

**5 September 1984**

* * *

This is the story of a boy who was late, and another who was going to be.

Jim Moriarty couldn't find his watch on his first day of school, so he tried to run the last few streets to make sure he was on time. He tripped over on the uneven pavement and cut his knee. This meant that he had to limp the rest of the way to school. As a result, he was out of breath upon his arrival to the classroom, and the left knee of his trousers was torn and slightly bloody. The pale skin of his leg, his entire complexion washed out from days sitting in the corner of his dark bedroom digging his penknife into the wall, highlighted the startling scarlet smear.

He shuffled from one foot to another as Mrs Lynch introduced him at the front of the class. All the other children's eyes were on him and his heart was hammering in his chest.

_Look at the floor. Look at the floor._

Jim could hear sniggering and he knew what he must've looked like – un-tucked shirt, dishevelled hair, ripped trousers. He felt like a vagrant in comparison to their pristine jumpers and carefully styled hairdos. Whispers were rising but he didn't dare look up to see the source of them; it was enough to catch the barbed tones. They all thought they were so _clever_, he mentally hissed, so _superior_.

He thought of the beetle he'd dismembered the night before, and recalled its little legs squirming even as they were separated from the shining body. He remembered the glint of his penknife with fondness, replacing the shining of his new classmate's eyes with that of the shining blade. His knife was nice. It never laughed at him. Not like these people here. These _children. _He'd show them that he was much cleverer than any of them, and they'd respect him. They would.

His mum knew – she saw it in his eyes sometimes, but they never talked about it. He knew that she saw something in him that he revelled in; something dark and not-quite-right; something that no eight year old should have living inside them. Over the years he'd gotten better at masking his emotions and he was smart enough to know that his peers wouldn't appreciate his complexity. Best keep it hidden, for now.

"So, James," Mrs Lynch turned on him with a kindly smile.

"Jim." He instantly corrected her. The laughter grew louder still, maybe at his accent, maybe at his quick retort. Mrs Lynch's lips froze into a tight, thin, line.

She had been in the education business for a long time, Jim could see, by her impatient frown and her quick temper. Her understanding smiles were just an opaque front for the bitterness that could only be gained by years of teaching students who didn't want to learn. She was under some sort of stress, and it was probably affecting her sleep, judging by the shadows under her eyes. Yet she wanted to project severity and authority, which was apparent by her hair, scraped into a bun so tightly that the veins on her forehead bulged.

"Yes." She said, softly, "Jim."

He could have sworn her left eye twitched, and began to envision a number of scenarios that would have caused her to have a nervous tic.

"Why don't you tell the class something about yourself?"

Heart fluttering, Jim turned to look at the sea of faces, who were watching him with eager grins. This was way better than double Maths – watching the new kid wriggle under the microscope. His mind flicked through the different things he could reveal about himself, and he settled on the ordinary. Best to live up to their expectations.

"My family moved here from Dublin last month," he said. "They thought it was best to get settled before school started, because things are different here. Um… But I look forward to it…" He trailed off, quietened by his own ridiculous nervousness.

"What subjects do you like, Jim?" Mrs Lynch helped him, but her uncaring tone was obvious.

"Science." His answer was almost instantaneous. "I especially like Biology, particularly the study of the human anatomy." Everyone blinked in surprise at this, and he warned himself to dumb down a little, or they'd suspect something wasn't normal.

"Very good; you can sit down next to Carl." She gestured to the only empty seat in the classroom, in the back right corner. In those last four words, Mrs Lynch relinquished her control over Jim and he stumbled to the designated chair. Everyone watched him walk to his seat before turned back to the front of the classroom. The new boy with the Irish accent had lost his novelty.

Jim hauled his black bag onto the desk and rummaged through it, pulling out a pencil case and a leather-bound notebook. He laid the pencil case on the edge of the desk, exactly in the corner, and the notebook squarely in front of him, carefully adjusting it a few times until he was sure of its straightness. Then he got out a pen, a pencil and a ruler and placed them next to one another, in a row, meticulously parallel to one another.

He didn't know the boy next to him was watching him until he looked up.

"What are you doing?" The boy asked.

Jim lowered his gaze back to his stationary and opened his notebook, counting three pages in and left it open before him. "I have to do things this way," he muttered.

"Why?"

Still not looking up, Jim shrugged. He didn't know why – he'd set his equipment up that way every day at school in Ireland, and he wasn't going to change his routine here.

"That's weird." The other boy, who Mrs Lynch had called Carl, said decisively. Little did Jim know at the time, but once Carl had given you the label of weird there was nothing you could do to shake it. It was the beginning of everything.

"And you have a handbag too!" Carl continued. Jim didn't need to look up to know that he was smirking.

"It's not a _handbag_," He snapped, slightly too defensively. "It's a satchel. Indiana Jones has one."

"Indiana Jones? The fictional character?" The scorn was heavy in Carl's voice.

Jim didn't lift his head, instead choosing to pick at the edge of the table and nod silently. He kept his eyes on the deteriorating plastic of the table. What were these tables even made of? The stuff was coming off with every pull, and getting under his nails. He wished he had his watch, so he could see how much longer he had to endure this.

"Well you're _very _cool, Jimmy." Carl drawled.

"And you're very stupid." He hissed back.

There was a pregnant pause, and Jim immediately wished he could take the words back. He could sense the fury building up beside him, even without glancing up, like a storm. He knew he'd made a fatal error. But then Carl just snorted and Jim saw him bending over his own book and concentrating on the lesson. He obviously thought that any further conversation with the new boy was a waste of time. He obviously thought the new boy was an idiot.

Jim turned to the front of the classroom and tried to listen to what was being discussed: long division. He resisted the urge to raise his eyebrows at the monotonous simplicity of it, and wondered how long he could keep up the pretence that he was at the same intellectual level as everyone else in the room.

Back at home he'd not learnt to hide it until it was too late, and he'd been in put in a fast-track education program in the corner of the classroom, on his own. Words like "prodigy" and "genius" were thrown around a lot in meetings with his mum, and he'd been asked whether or not he enjoyed school, and whether he understood what was going on in class. By this time, though, the school had seen him as an asset and hadn't really cared about his answers – they'd given him books aimed at children academically years ahead of him, made him stay after school for extra tuition, given him more complex homework. His life had become school and only that. Eventually it got the point where the school seemed to be grooming him for Trinity College, at only the age of eight, so his mother had seen fit to pull him out.

As much as Jim had enjoyed feeling superior to his classmates, he hated their sneers and nicknames: "brainbox", "geek", "genius Jimmy". Not that he cared what they thought. Nor did he get lonely sometimes, sitting on the bench in the far corner of the playground with an apple for his lunch; or when he was the last to be picked for any sport, and even then they'd rather not him on their team.

Things would be different here, Jim hoped, he'd pretend to be someone else and that would make everything better. Of course he wouldn't pander to them – they had no power over him – but he'd rather keep his head down and act stupid and _ordinary._

"Does anyone know the answer?" Mrs Lynch turned away from the board and brandished her stick of chalk threateningly at the sea of bemused faces. The silence that met her question was deafening.

Jim glanced around and saw his peers staring out of windows and at walls, blankly. They honestly didn't seem to care what the answer was; they didn't even seem to be listening. Carl still his head bent over his book, and seemed to be scrawling something.

The silence was dragging like a net along stones and nobody seemed to be willing to break it. Mrs Lynch had the stubborn face that Jim recognised well – she wasn't going to speak until the silence became so awkward that someone put their hand up, even if it was with the wrong answer. Conversely, the children seemed to be so uncaring that they wouldn't be bothered by a strained silence.

Hating himself, Jim slowly raised his hand. The answer was so glaringly obvious that he couldn't just let this pass. He'd just do it once, he promised himself, and then go back to trying to be invisible. It wouldn't be his old school, because this time he would hide his cleverness.

"Yes?" Mrs Lynch pointed at him. She didn't seem pleased or irritated at his contribution, merely coldly detached. Obviously, she assumed he'd get it wrong.

"Seven, Miss." Jim said, clearly and confidently.

She blinked and was quiet for a moment, before nodded slowly. "Well done, James."

"Jim."

Ignoring him, she turned to address the whole class now: "Everyone; do you all understand how he got the answer?"

She was met with a chorus of unfeeling yeses and half-hearted mutterings. It was clear that nobody really understood, or cared enough to try, but Mrs Lynch was so desperate to move on that she accepted their uninterested attitude. "Excellent!" She smiled wanly.

"Nice one, loser." A whisper from his left made Jim flinch. Carl had looked up from his book, but was still hunched over it, covering what he'd written. The effect made him look like a vindictive goblin guarding treasure, not helped by his wolfish grin. "Did they teach you maths in Paddy town?"

Jim didn't know what to do – how had this happened? He'd just answered one question, not overly intelligently. He hadn't done anything to warrant this, had he? He just looked at Carl and didn't say anything. Maybe the other boy would go back to whatever he was doing if he thought Jim wasn't upset by him.

"Hey, I'm speaking to you." Carl hissed. Suddenly, too fast for Jim to move away, his hand shot out and he stabbed Jim in the hand with the nib of his pen. It didn't hurt, not really, but the shock of it electrified his every nerve. He jumped a little too visibly, and Carl laughed softly. Jim could only imagine what he looked like – wide eyes like a rabbit caught in headlights, and a slightly gaping mouth. He still didn't trust himself to say a word.

"What's up, Indie, huh?" Carl jabbed him again, not as hard this time, "What's up? Don't you want to talk to me? Too clever for me? Huh?" He poked him again and again.

"N-no." Jim managed to whisper, staring at the blue dots that the pen had left on his skin. "Of course not."

"So." Carl's voice lost its villainous edge and was suddenly calm and friendly, but there was no doubt of his intentions. "How are you so clever?"

Jim shrugged in barely a movement. "I just know stuff, that's all."

"You just _know_ stuff." Jim didn't need to look up to know that Carl was looking right at him, letting the absurdity of his statement sink in, letting the silence hang awkwardly. "Well, you're a right misfit, aren't you, Irish?" His tone was mockingly pleasant, like he was talking to a friend, and that made it even worse. Jim sat as still as he could, like an animal in front of a hunter.

All of a sudden, the bell rang, and Jim couldn't have fled the classroom faster. But he didn't need to turn back to see Carl laughing at him, because the sound followed him on his way.


	2. 19 September 1984

**19 September 1984**

* * *

Mrs Lynch sighed and visibly straightened her back as Jim's hand shot up again. Her eyes roamed the classroom, desperately looking for someone else to answer the question, before finally settling back on Jim, whose arm was straining out of its socket as if he was trying to reach the ceiling.

She pitied his enthusiasm because she had the vantage point that only a teacher could have, and she saw the nudges and grins of the other students. Children could be so cruel she'd learnt, in her forty years of teaching, and this class was no exception. She could sense the malicious undercurrent in their excited teasing of the new boy.

Admittedly, Jim didn't help himself – his too long handbag, his messy hair, his pale skin, his odd mannerisms. Mrs Lynch expected some form of social anxiety disorder, because Jim hardly ever made eye contact unless to inform or fight back. He had a horrible habit of snapping at the tiniest remark, making the ridicule only worse.

It was a shame that the teasing had to occur, but it was inevitable: some people were beacons for it. She wouldn't be so controversial as to say he "asked for it", but he was certainly a magnet for scorn. If anyone was going to get it, it would be Jim Moriarty.

"Yes James?" She asked, wearily.

"Jim."

Oh, of course: he had a strange obsession with shortening his name. Perhaps it was a converging device, Mrs Lynch pondered, or just a preference. It was irritating, seeing as she had a tendency to call her students by their full names, but she assumed that his life was wretched enough, so she could try to afford him his little wish.

"Sorry," She simpered patronizingly, "Jim. Go ahead."

He didn't seem fazed by her; instead he smoothed imaginary creases on his shirt with a laughable flourish and cleared his throat. Oh, Lord. "That's quite alright, Mrs Lynch." He said, grandly. The sound of chair legs scraping signalled the fact that he was standing up. Mrs Lynch closed her eyes in despair as the laughter started. Didn't he know what he was doing? He seemed a bright enough boy, academically, but it was also his hubris. His cleverness overshadowed his social etiquette, and this resulted in a hybridization of admiration at his intelligence and painful embarrassment at his actions.

"The Romans gave us the foundations of modern civilization – aqueducts and education and irrigations, for example. Their hygiene was the peak before the decline for the next three hundred years." He spoke with perfect annunciation and boyish cockiness, and looked so proud of himself, that he seemed like an aged professor trapped in an eight year old's body.

What kind of child – "Textbook perfect, James!"

"Jim." He whispered. Then he smiled emptily and sat back down without another word. If she didn't know better, she'd have thought he looked regretful. She turned back to the board as Carl leant towards Jim again. In the two weeks since Jim's first day, the taunting had become a regular occurrence. Carl had labelled Jim as a loser and that had stuck – there was nothing he could do about it.

"Well done, Irish. Very clever. Shame nobody could understand you because of your stupid accent." He muttered. There was no physical action yet, but the words were like stings and every syllable was like a blow in Jim's gut. He often tried to ignore it and pray that it would just stop, but the little pains came in waves: a stupid nickname or petty insult meant the world. Everything darkened when he arrived in the classroom, and everything hurt. He'd begged his mum to let him stay off school, and faked temperatures by heating up thermometers and flicking water onto his face. But where his mum was concerned, you had to be throwing up blood to warrant a day off school.

The next jibe came with a few more sniggers: Carl had obviously gotten his friends involved. "I like your handbag, Jimmy. Really cool. Like Indiana Jones." Quiet laughter. Jim curled over his desk, petrified that his heart was beating so loudly that they would hear it, and waited for it be finished. "Of course you're too weak to actually live up to Indie. You're just a wanna-be."

Jim felt something nudge against his elbow and, against his better judgement, looked down. His pencil case, so carefully laid out next to his stationary, in line with the corner of the table, was at a jaunty angle. It had in turn knocked his stationary out of place and Jim followed the progression of his pen as it rolled of the desk and landed on the floor with a click.

Mrs Lynch whirled back from the board and glared daggers at the class. "Everyone, copy the timeline on the board. And James, for goodness sake, pick up your pen!"

"It's Jim, Mrs Lynch." Jim muttered, hastily leapt to his feet and walking around his desk.

Carl stuck his foot out and Jim tripped awkwardly, taking a few stumbling steps to stay standing. "Oh, sorry _James_," he said too loudly, smiling devilishly.

Wordlessly, Jim bent down and grabbed the offending pen before haring back to his seat. He set it down next to the others, which he then went about straightening with painful precision. When he was satisfied with them, he sat back and watched the lesson with a passive interest. He figured that Carl had had his fun for this lesson, maybe, if he was lucky, for this day.

_Swish_. Jim felt the nudge on his arm, and knew from the laughter that Carl had moved his pencil case again. He swallowed – it obviously wasn't over yet. He calmly straightened it again, and kept his eyes trained on the stationary as he straightened them. _Swish. _Straighten. _Swish. _Straighten.

Jim could feel the desperation building inside his chest like a leaden weight, and he blinked rapidly to stop the tears of frustration from gathering in his eyes. It was so menial and so stupid: he was more a victim of his strange obsessive straightening than he was of Carl. It was his own fault. If he'd just stop being such a freak, so obsessed with order, so paranoid that his stationary and pencil case would get out of line, such a loser, so clever –

_Swish._

"Stop it, would you?" Jim cried, his head suddenly darting up and his eyes blazing darkly. "Just stop it!" For a moment Carl was afraid – there was something abnormal in the other boy's gaze, something dangerous, but then he got a grip.

"Stop what, Jimmy?" He asked, amused at the outburst. His pupils were glittering with unspoken laughter and his mouth flickered into a smile for a moment. His look was saying _there's nothing you can do about this; just accept it. _His look was saying _don't even try to fight, because I'll always win. This is the way things are._

Mrs Lynch's dark shadow fell over Carl and Jim's desk and the giggling hushed in an instant, all the other children's faces turning to them. "_What_ is going on?"

"Nothing, Miss." Carl smiled innocently, like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth, and Jim felt his hand flex involuntarily as he thought about hitting him around the face. He wasn't shocked about this: he'd often envisioned seeing parts of people that should remain on the inside on the outside; he'd often dreamt about blood and longed to do twisted things. In fact, in comparison to the dark thoughts that paraded his head after the lights had gone out, the want to hit Carl was incredibly tame.

Mrs Lynch turned her gaze slowly on Jim and raised her eyebrows, disbelieving. "James? What is going on?"

A million thoughts rushed through Jim's head: he was Jim, not James; he was having thoughts that he'd never had before, that he hadn't even voiced to himself; he was being victimized; he was being humiliated; he was terrified to come to school; he felt lonely and scared; he was a freak; he was too clever for his own good.

"Nothing, Mrs Lynch." He said, quietly, and looked her directly in the eye and begging that she sensed his agony. "Absolutely nothing." Help me.

She watched them for a few more seconds, obviously not believing, but there wasn't anything she could really do if Jim wouldn't admit there was a problem. It wasn't as if she wasn't trying to help him – he was obviously trying to bury his head in the sand and ignore the teasing. Mrs Lynch knew from years of teaching that this wouldn't work, and she could only hope that it wouldn't escalate. Sighing under her breath, she turned her back on them and walked to the front of the room. With her, she took Jim's safety net.

The squeak of the chair told Jim that Carl was leaning over towards him, too close, invading his personal space. In his peripheral vision he saw Carl's grin, but he tried to keep his eyes facing dead forwards. Ignore it. Ignore it and it will go away. "Very good, Irish. Wouldn't want me to get in trouble. Things would be very difficult for you."

Oh, for God's sake. Could he _be _more cliché? It was painful, really it was, but it was terrifying too. Because Jim sensed something in Carl akin to what he saw in himself – something broken irreparably; something capricious. But it was more animalistic in the other boy: he wanted to simply cause violence and humiliation. He didn't want to plan or dream or respect, he only wanted to destroy. Conversely, Jim's darkness was more elegant: he wanted to shatter chits of bone and paint with scarlet and explore anatomy. He was only eight years old, but he knew that there was something different inside his head. Growing like a tumour. And he let it.

"Got nothing to say, James? Nothing to say?" He could smell Carl's breath right next to him, and he stank of mints and must. He was literally radiating hatred and Jim thought that, as long as he lived, he would never understand that kind of primal fury that resided in Carl. That kind of agonizing anger which made him want to lash out in such a brutal way. Didn't he know that causing pain was an art? He was degrading the beauty of watching someone suffer, of knowing that you had caused their suffering. Jim felt personally offended by Carl's bullying, mostly for himself, but partly because this boy was mindlessly rampaging with no thought to neatness and planning.

"You can't ignore me forever, Jimmy," Carl hissed maliciously. "But you're boring me now so I'll leave you alone. For now." He moved back and leant against the back of his chair, folding his arms and calmly smiling at the thought of the carnage that he was yet to cause. And, despite the fact that Jim hated his methods, he felt his stomach constrict in fear.


	3. 13 October 1984

**13 October 1984**

* * *

The lessons were mandatory: everyone had to learn how to swim, the teachers said. They had packed the class onto a coach and sent them on their way with packed lunches.

Jim had sat on his own at the front, staring down at his jam sandwiches and wishing he could be anywhere but there. He could hear Carl and his friends laughing too loudly at the back of the coach, taking up the four seats along the last row, and jostling each other. He couldn't work out what was so funny, and didn't think he wanted to know.

Pulling out his notebook, Jim settled back into his seat. He looked out of the window and watched the trees and blue sky shoot past in a blur, wondering what it would be like to fly. He felt something hit the back of his head and, on automatic, he turned around to see what it was. A screwed up bit of paper lay on the floor beside him, and Carl and his friends were laughing even louder than before.

Not bothering to pick the paper up, or even acknowledge it, Jim turned back to face the front and blinked several times to stop his eyes from stinging.

* * *

The swimming pool was deceptive – Jim had no idea how deep it was, really. He could see the bottom, but he knew that it was meters down. It was glittering teasingly, almost asking him to jump in and break the stillness, and rippled eerily. The painted tiles on the pool walls chronicled the descent to the floor, getting deeper and deeper as they went along.

He'd heard a story, once, about a woman who had drowned in a swimming pool, her hair had gotten sucked into the ventilation system on the floor, and nobody had noticed her there, at the bottom of the pool, slowly bloating with water. People swam over her for weeks until someone complained about the smell and she was found, blue and swollen. Jim watched the water, almost certain that there weren't any corpses in there, but not definite. What if one reached up and grabbed him with their rotting arm, dragging him down to their watery grave? He shuddered.

"Dare you to jump in the deep end." The whisper came from directly beside his left ear, too close, and Jim flinched and turned to face Carl. The other boy was perfectly calm, his arms folded across his bare chest, and he was leaning his weight on one foot. His hair was wind-swept from the shower he'd had before changing and it made him look like a hedgehog. Jim would have smiled at the comparison, had his heart not been thudding sickly.

"I said," Carl's face flashed from jokingly friendly to a frown in an instant, and he took a step forwards. Jim stepped back, towards the edge of the pool. "I dare you. To _jump in_."

Jim shook his head fiercely and muttered something, not looking at Carl. He kept his gaze fixed on the damp floor in front of him.

"What was that, Irish?" Carl asked, raising a hand to his ear and cupping it mockingly, as if to hear better. "Speak up!" Then he laughed, because he'd already heard.

"I can't swim," Jim mumbled, blushing and shifting from one foot to the other. He hoped that his humiliation would be enough and he'd be left alone. His heart was hammering so hard that he thought it might burst out of his chest. Maybe this was why people had ribcages, he mused, because otherwise their hearts would spill all over the floor.

Carl let out a few bark-like laughs and looked at him with an unnerving mixture of pity and horror. His mouth formed an O in a parody of surprise and his eyes lit up as if he was about to tell a joke. "You can't swim?" He repeated, and gasped theatrically. "Well, I'd better fix that, hadn't I?"

Sensing the attack before it came, Jim started off in a sprint for the changing rooms. His feet slammed on the damp floor, in time with his heart, and his breath came in erratic bursts. He didn't bother to shout out – the coach was in his office and none of his classmates would help him – but focused his energy on running. He reached his hands out, centimetres away from the door to the changing rooms, when he felt someone grab his shoulder. He spun around and tried to hit out at them, but they got a hold of his wrist and began dragging him back towards the pool.

He shouted then, feeling tears springing to eyes. He didn't shout for help: that would be pointless. He cried that he couldn't swim, he couldn't swim, stop, please, he couldn't swim. Suddenly he was surrounded by a sea of pale faces, all of them smiling ghoulishly.

He was being pulled along by someone he didn't know the name of. He recognised the boy, vaguely, as someone who sat at the front of the classroom. Not too clever, not so that he got teased about it, but not too stupid either. He was average in looks, brown hair, brown eyes, and average in just about everything else. Jim didn't even know his name. He didn't know who was leading him to the water.

Panicking, Jim tried to lash out and only succeeding in weakly struggling against their grip. "Get his arms!" Someone shouted, and his arms were pinned behind his back, twisting his shoulders so painfully that he cried out. The crowd jeered as one – a rising, malicious, note. A couple of people laughed, but Jim didn't know who. They were a single entity now, not separate people. They were a monster.

The other students cleared a path as Jim was hauled to water's edge. He was held there, his toes clenching the rim of the pool and his breath coming haphazardly. He was staring down at the rippling water. He could see the bottom and the tiles looked large and distorted by the blue light of the water.

The slow tread of deliberate footsteps quietened the crowd and Jim let out a pathetic whimper. Because he knew. He knew who had made the class go quiet, and what that meant. He felt a shudder run through his body, involuntarily. He could only imagine how weak he looked. And, in that moment, he hated himself.

"Don't be scared, Jimmy." When Carl spoke, he was directly to Jim's left. The arms holding him in place tightened their grip and Jim hissed in pain. "It's not a long way down. It's just like flying, really." Jim didn't need to look at him to know that he was smirking cruelly. "Except there's a more permanent destination."

The push, when it came, made the world tilt and spin and everything blur. It must have only lasted for a few seconds, but Jim felt like he was falling a million miles. He didn't know which way was up and where anything was.

Suddenly, he slammed onto the hard face of the water and broke through. It smashed every nerve in his body and his bones ached with the force of it. His eyes were screwed as tightly as he could make them, black against the blackness of the water. He could feel himself sinking like a stone. If he could just come up for air. If he could just come up. His arms flailed and his legs thrashed wildly as he struggled to rise, but he could only break the surface of the pool for a few seconds, coughing and spluttering desperately, clawing for air, before sinking again.

Everything was muffled by the sound barrier of the water but, even in his terror, Jim could hear everyone laughing. They were laughing at him. He was drowning, dying, and they were laughing.

He struggled up for air again, his mouth wide and gaping as he took a few gasps and inhaled water. He coughed breathlessly to try and clear it, but the action made him sink below again. He couldn't stay afloat and, for all the struggling he had done, he could feel his little strength begin to fade. He could feel his lungs burning with the need for oxygen and his chest felt like it was on fire for it. He closed his mouth to stop the inhalation of more water and waved his arms wildly.

"Jim!"

The voice was familiar but the worried tone wasn't. Through the haze of droplets of water and fear for his life, Jim looked up and saw Carl. The other boy's face was a mask of concern and it was strange to see because it was so unusual. He was reaching his hand out, trying to grab Jim, and stretching as far as he could. "Take my hand!" He called.

Jim struggled through the water, trying to swim towards Carl's hand. He kicked and splashed like a dog and his eyes lit up with relief: it was going to be okay. For reasons unknown to him, Carl was going to help him out. Perhaps he'd realised that Jim was actually drowning, in danger, and had a change of heart. Jim vowed that he didn't care what Carl did to him ever again, and that he was just pleased to have been rescued.

Only centimetres away from the edge now, Jim managed to kick enough to just about keep afloat and reached out to Carl's hand. The other boy was smiling. But it wasn't a nice smile. It was a hungry smile, an impish grin. His eyes were sparkling harshly.

Jim's hand grabbed at air – Carl's hand was no longer there. At the last second, he'd whipped it away. Jim felt his stomach tighten and his vision go blurry as tears rose, unbidden, in his eyes. He watched as Carl raised his hand to his forehead and formed an L shape with his forefinger and thumb, mouthing _loser_. Then he cracked up laughing.

The water engulfed Jim's head and he let himself sink, wondering how long it would take to drown, and if it would hurt. He watched the dapples of light flit across the skin of the water above him and break the darkness of the water with golden-yellow bars. He felt as if he were at the bottom of the ocean and followed the progress of a stream of tiny bubbles from his nose to the surface. Everything was bathed in a mournful blue and looked quite beautiful. Jim felt pressure building in his head like he couldn't describe: like an iron vice was clamped on his temples and was slowly pressing down, as if his brain was swelling in his head and knocking against his skull. His heart was thudding silently, counting down the way a bomb does. Not long now.

He wondered if dying was meant to feel like flying. Perhaps Carl had been right, Jim wondered distantly. Maybe he was flying and that was okay because he wouldn't hurt anymore. Maybe he would go to a better place, a more permanent destination. He saw the water blur around him in an explosion of white bubbles and felt someone tug at his arms, heaving him up. No, no, no, he begged wordlessly. Leave me here. It's so peaceful.

When Jim broke the surface of the water he took an instinctive breath and coughed, throwing up a transparent mixture of water and mucus. He was on all fours, hacking. He had no time to breathe because each breath was just a gateway for another cough. His eyes were streaming and his nose was running – his entire body was dripping onto the tiled floor. He was shaking uncontrollably and he felt like he would never be warm, never be dry, again.

Very, very, far away, Jim heard someone shouting: _What in the hell happened? _He thought that the person need not be so loud, because it hadn't been scary. It had been calm. He had been okay, but now this shouting man had burst in and shattered the peace. Everything was rushing back in a wave. He could hear, through legions of water and fog in his mind, and he registered mutterings of "sorry". He could see, and he saw the sickly brown tiles of the swimming pool floor glistening with trails of his insides merely inches away from his face.

He sat back and swayed, realisation coming last: he had almost died. Carl had tried to kill him, right there in the pool. Perhaps not intentionally, but through Carl's actions Jim had almost lost his life. His vision focused and unfocused, hazing and sharpening. He felt caught between two existences, torn in two, not wholly there.

It was in this strange half-state, as the coach helped him up and wrapped a towel around his shaking body, carefully leading him to the changing rooms and telling him that he was okay, that Jim had a second realisation: it hadn't been enough. Whatever need that lay inside Carl hadn't been sated by this near-death experience. It wasn't going to stop.

The school didn't demand that Jim continued with swimming lessons; he was allowed to sit on the side of the pool with a book as the other children were instructed. And, as long as he lived, Jim never swam again.


	4. 14 October 1984

**14 October 1984**

* * *

"Did you hear what your Paddy mate did?"

Jim couldn't get past Carl because the other boy was leaning across the doorframe and blocking his way. He was smiling hungrily and crossing one ankle over the other – the epitome of calm. Sometimes Jim wondered if Carl actually dressed up for occasions such as this, so ridiculously casual was his clothing: a shirt with the top three buttons undone, dark blue jeans that were stupidly too big and scruffy hair, as though he'd been running his hands through it to achieve the look. He radiated a relaxed, predatory, aura: it was as if he made the effort.

It was just a day after the swimming pool event, and it had taken Jim everything to walk from his car to school this morning. He had shaken with every step and would have bolted into the bathroom, had he not been spotted by as teacher and sent to class. Then he had tried to walk across the playground but, to do so, he had to pass the classroom. Carl had seen him.

Knowing that it would be useless to try and push past Carl, or ignore him, Jim mutely shook his head. It was a lie of course – everyone had heard.

His mum had folded the paper away too quickly when Jim had come down for breakfast, smiled too warmly, and when she'd gone to get changed he'd grabbed it and seen: the IRA had tried to kill the Prime Minister. It was so brazen and simple, there on the paper, but the repercussions were like the ripples left when a bolder falls into a lake. Jim had felt like he was sinking all over again as he stared down at the news report. Brighton. It had happened here, in their town. His thoughts had immediately leaped to Carl and he'd run to the toilet to throw up.

"Well you're just a big old liar, then, aren't you Jimmy?" Carl said, but he didn't sound too annoyed about it. In fact he sounded pleased: this meant a game; this meant he had to extract the words from Jim slowly and messily, embarrassingly. "My dad told me that all your lot should go home." Carl said, shaking his head. "I think he was wrong there though: I think you should all be shot. You can't just come into our country and kill our Prime Min'ster." He said it oddly, like the word was a difficult one, but Jim didn't dare to grin. "You're all terrorists – hiding behind your stupid accents, nicking our jobs and killing our MP's."

At that Jim frowned. He knew that Carl wanted a confrontation, so he decided to fight it on a level which he might win: intellectually. "How would _you_ know what an MP is?" He asked, scornfully. He hardly understood himself, truthfully, he only knew that they were important and made decisions about the country. But he also knew that he knew a damn sight more than Carl did.

"My dad told me," Carl stood up from his leaning position and glared at Jim, puffing his chest out a little. "Nobody wants you here, Irish, you should just go home. No one wanted to tell you but they were talking about it before you arrived. Everyone's scared you've got a knife or a bomb or something and you're going to kill us."

"That's so stupid," Jim cried, looking beyond Carl and seeing the group of worried faces watching them. They did seem too still, too quiet, to be normal. Maybe he was telling the truth and these people really were ignorant enough to be afraid of Jim because of where he came from, after all these were the children who had thrown him into a swimming pool against his will.

Carl shoved Jim in the chest and took a slow step forwards and Jim stumbled back. "Is it, Irish? Is it?" He asked, pushing him again. Jim didn't fall, but tripped backwards and just managed to stay standing. "Don't you have any bombs on you? Not going to pull a gun on us?"

"I'd never bomb people!" Jim shouted a little too loudly. He blinked to clear the mental images of sailing red chunks, shards of bone, tears mixing with blood. He had been fascinated with the idea of the Brighton Hotel bombing – how the building must have exploded into particles of dust and mortar, how the bricks must have shattered and the sound that it must have made. But Carl would never know that.

Carl grabbed Jim's collar and hauled in a few centimetres off the ground. Jim wasn't heavy, but this was still a feat and impressed murmurs broke out from the watching class. His arms were shaking, but Jim wondered if his shirt would rip before Carl dropped him. He could hear the material tearing already. "No one wants you here, Jimmy." Carl said, viciously blunt.

The piercing voice of Mrs Lynch broke the tirade: "Carl? What is going on?" Both the boys looked around to see her clipping neatly in her heels down the hall, her bun coming out in wisps and her high-necked jumper looking like it was choking her. "You should be inside the classroom by now!"

It was so obvious that Jim was being attacked – Carl was literally lifting him off the floor, and everyone was staring avidly – but Mrs Lynch just stood and looked at them both, as if the real crime here was their punctuality. More accurately, she was looking at Carl. Jim saw her flicker a nervous glance towards him, for hardly a second, and then look back to Carl. It only lasted for a split second but it was enough. Jim understood. He felt his feet touch the ground again, and the pain of his shirt digging into his shoulders subsided.

"Yes, Miss," Carl said, softly. He'd missed her ignoring of Jim and was scraped his foot along the ground. "Sorry, Miss," He didn't look at Jim again and traipsed past the fuming teacher, into the classroom where the other students had already taken their seats.

Mrs Lynch was left outside with Jim. She swayed a little on her feet and seemed to be suffering an internal conflict of sorts. She looked both concerned and resentful but Jim couldn't tell if she was resenting being concerned about him, or if she was resenting him and being concerned about it. He was the struggle in her eyes and decided not to make in any easier for her: he wouldn't move until she told him to. Her obligation as a teacher was to demand that he went into the classroom, yet her morals as a human seemed to be telling her that she didn't want him there. Jim watched her, stock still.

At last she said, "You too, Jim." She didn't look at him and stared at the floor in front of his feet instead. Then she whipped her head up and stalked into the room, without a backwards glance. It took Jim a few seconds to realise that she hadn't called him James. He followed her with his eyes as she picked up her chalk and began writing on the blackboard, brushing some hair out of her face and babbling about quietening down, even though nobody was talking.

When Jim took his seat next to Carl he felt the heat of everyone's gaze on him and kept his head bent, pulling out his pencil case and notebook to begin the monotonous routine of his daily ritual. He didn't look up even as he felt their stares drift away, instead carefully straightened his stationary and flipped open his notebook and sat with his back straight, his hands clasped together on the desk. Nor did he once let himself look at Carl who, in turn, ignored him. All the students silently let the lesson progress in that dull, half-asleep state that they sometimes lulled into. Mrs Lynch just talked at them as they took notes and nobody asked questions, nobody said anything out of turn, but they all felt it in the air: the presence in the back of the classroom. They flinched when Jim moved his chair and chanced glances at one another as his pencil scraped on his paper. Jim pretended not to notice; they pretended not to be bothered.

As the lesson dragged itself onwards, Jim let his mind float above and beyond the mediocrity of it all. He imagined that there was someone out there, in the world, who understood him. Someone who was the same; a person who got bored with it all too. He envisioned that they were on the same intellectual level. Maybe they were even the same age, he pondered, and there was another boy somewhere who was thinking exactly the same thing as him right now. He vowed that if he were to ever meet this person, he would fall in love with them. They would be above the ordinary people, better than them, but it would be alright because they'd have each another.

Jim looked around at these normal, monochrome children. They terrified him, yes, each and every single one of them – they could physically overpower him in an instant. But he also despised them because they were so _dull_. They didn't think outside of the constricting boxes of their lives: their fates had laid out for them an average job, an entrapping marriage, an unassuming death. But Jim, sitting in the back of the classroom with only his stark thoughts, was planning something more spectacular for himself.

He could sense a shifting inside his head and had no idea what the cause of it was. Maybe it was the blatant disregard from the other students, or his near death experience. Perhaps it was the bottomless loneliness or the thought that someone else had wanted to do something, attack the Prime Minister, and they had just gone ahead and done it. So maybe it wasn't wrong. If it had been the wrong thing to do, Jim reasoned, then God or destiny or something would have stopped it.

Perhaps these ordinary people had right and wrong, good and bad, mixed up. Just because everyone agreed on something, did that make it correct? He thought of the swimming pool. He knew the answer. Jim felt a sudden sense of clarity when he came to the conclusion that there was no reason to do all of the good he could, all of the time, when he didn't _want_ to. He had hidden his dismembered beetles and other experiments with shame because he thought that there was something not right in them. He thought he was the one with the problem.

But he could see that it was them, the _ordinary people, _who had the problem. People like Carl, who caused pain with no regard of subtlety or beauty. Mrs Lynch, who ignored issues that were staring her right in the face. His mum who believed the lies that Jim was telling her about having friends, because it was easier than seeing the truth: her son was a freak. His dad, who called him James again and again as he hit him. But no, no, no. He was Jim now.

The thought about his dad shocked him for a moment, before he realised that it was alright: that part of his life was finished and he had nothing to fear from it. His dad had left when his mum had threatened him with the police. He had only left Jim with bruises and an obsession with shortening his name. The bruises had been intention. The name had been an accident. He was just another person in the long line of people who were beneath his care, Jim realised. There were so many that he sorted them into categories: lasting and unintentional. Mrs Lynch's crimes weren't on purpose, she was just ignorant. Jim forgave her because she was stupid. But then he placed the face of everyone in his class in the line. They were in the lasting category, because what they had done to him would never fade. He supposed he should thank them for shaping him, but he knew they wouldn't understand. His transformation was beyond their simple capabilities.

He mentally jostled through the line until he reached Carl. He watched the physical boy sitting beside him, for once giving him peace, and copied the image into his head. Mentally, he ran his gaze across every contour of Carl's face and took notice of the dash of every vein. He lifted Carl's arms up and danced him like a puppet. He pulled back Carl's skin and watched his muscles jump and twitch. He climbed the rungs of his ribs and bit his heart. He played his sinews and drank his cherry blood.

I will let the bully have his Golden Era, Jim decided mercifully. He wouldn't fight back anymore, and wait until the opportune moment. Whether it happened next week or in a year, Jim knew that his heyday would come. He would make Carl pay for everything. Jim thought of chlorine shadows and breathlessness. He smiled to himself.

With hollow promises, he guided Carl to the edge of the pool and there, in his head, Jim played with his enemy, in his own way.


	5. 20 November 1984

**20 November 1984**

* * *

The suggestion from his mother came suddenly one breakfast. Early morning sunlight cut through the netted curtains and cast a golden glow across the entire kitchen, highlighting every crack in the walls and damp stain on the ceiling. The only sound before the question had been the shouting of neighbours and the barking of a dog. It was nine o'clock, but his mum insisted on not being disturbed before eight. If God could have a day of rest, she said, then so could she. And so Jim had padded around silently, re-reading his books and wishing that his mum had paid the TV licence because he wondered what he was missing with television. She had appeared earlier than usually, and he should've realised then. She had to have a reason.

"Are you going to have some friends around for your birthday?"

Jim had been pouring cereal when she asked, and he jumped: they usually didn't talk in the mornings and this attack was unprecedented. His mum never took an interest in his birthdays, not as much as she took an interest in his friends, and they often passed with barely a mention. For the last four years Jim had only been able to keep track of his age by a calendar which he'd recycled, because where would they get the money to buy a new one? He'd re-marked his birthday four times. But his mum was taking an interest _now_? Maybe it was because of the lies he'd been feeding her: Yes, he had friends at his new school. It wasn't like it had been back in Dublin. The kids in his class were nice.

His flinch sent a splash of milk onto his sleeve, and it was a few days old so the smell would linger horribly. Jim immediately thought of Carl, and reasoned that if there wasn't the smell of old milk to laugh at, then he'd find something else. He put the carton down and fiercely scrubbed his sleeve against the table cloth, staring at it and praying that his mum wouldn't bring it up again.

"James?"

He looked up slowly. Don't ask. Don't ask. "Yes?" He asked, softly.

"Don't you have any friends you want to come over for your birthday?" She was smiling so brightly that he wanted to hit her. Her blonde hair hung in limp curls around her face, so he knew that she'd made an effort today. Usually, his mum just let her hair fall in greasy strands and she didn't ever wear make-up. But not today, no: she had lipstick on, but not enough to look ridiculous, and her hair was actually styled. Jim came to two conclusions in the space of a minute: she had suddenly had a revelation and wanted to be beautiful, or she was seeing someone. His mum wasn't one for epiphanies, so he knew it was the latter.

That must have put her in her good mood. Jim couldn't ruin that. "Of course, mum," He smiled back at her, forcing his mouth to stretch and hoping that he looked happy and not furious.

She looked positively thrilled – it would have been funny were it not so tragic – and her next words made his blood freeze. "Good, because I've made invitations!"

"You've… _what_?" He breathed.

Almost out of thin air, she pulled several pieces of paper. They were handwritten on cream card, the thick kind that's used in fancy hotels and menus. He could see his mum's spidery handwriting scrawled on them, but he didn't even need to read the words for his heart to compress. She had obviously been planning this for a while, he had no idea where she'd gotten the paper from, and put an unreasonable amount of effort into making the invitations.

Jim stared at her with a mixture of horror and sadness: why was she so _blind_? Did she honestly believe that he had made friends, and that everything was okay at his new school? The problem hadn't changed – he was still the same small, thin, weird kid that he'd been in Dublin – so how could everything be fine? Didn't she know that he was lying about his great new friends and his mild popularity? Or perhaps she just didn't want to see through the lies and face up to the truth: that her son was a freak. Maybe she was deliberately accepting his stories because she couldn't bear to notice that there was something deeply wrong in him.

"You can give them out to the children in your class," she said, holding them out to him. Her smile was wavering a little, probably due to his silence, but it was still there all the same. He couldn't bring himself to make her upset, because she was so horrible when she was sad. When his mum was upset, _everything _was his fault: his father leaving, them moving here, her low-paid job, her loneliness. She ranted on for hours, sometimes breaking down and ending up in a sobbing heap on the carpet.

Well, he corrected himself, she wasn't alone anymore. He just hoped the guy knew what he was getting into.

He nodded feverishly and took the invitations, marvelling at his ability to not shake. "Thanks mum," he beamed. It felt so false that he wanted to throw up. "That was really nice of you." It was, of course, but it was so misguided that it was actually painful. His mother's love was like a shard in his chest – piercing and aching.

For so long he'd wished that she'd been a _normal _mum. Taken him on trips and brought him new clothes when his old ones got too small and actually given a damn about him. But now she was taking an interest it was awful. Her smile was strained but she was genuinely happy, it was just that she was so unaccustomed to smiling that it appeared to be fake.

She stood up and glanced at the clock. Jim could see that her mind was already racing down the street to the bus stop, that she had effectively already left. Her hand unconsciously smoothed the skirt of her cliché cleaner's uniform and unconsciously picked at the fraying hem. "I'll be out late."

"Of course you will." The words were out of his mouth before he could stop them, loaded with malice and hatred.

She blinked in surprise, but then Jim actually watched her mentally lock it away and ignore it. He imagined his mother's mind as an attic: full of dusty cardboard boxes full of moments. All the times he said something odd or dangerous, all those murderous looks he sometimes gave, the flick-knife they both knew he kept under his mattress. She was literally pushing the truth away with all her might. He wanted to smash his bowl into her stupid face and grind it until she wasn't smiling anymore and the faded cream of the ceramic bowl became red mixed with droplets of white milk and orange cornflakes.

He clenched his free hand into a fist under the table.

"Honestly, James," She laughed and reached down to ruffle his hair, "I do wonder about what goes on that funny little head of yours!"

* * *

The invitations weighed Jim down. He didn't know why he didn't just throw them away as soon as his mum had left, but instead he shoved them into his coat pocket with the vague idea of throwing them in the bin when he got to school. He had barely given them a look – he'd caught sight of his mum's shaky script and synthetic politeness, "please" and "thank you", and it had been enough. He knew that nothing on earth would make him give these invitations out.

"Hey, loser!"

Except that.

Jim buried his hands into his pockets, as far as they would go, and hunched his shoulders over to make himself a smaller target. Knowing it would do no good, he kept walking and trained his gaze on the pathway. Suddenly the walk to school seemed so much longer, and he wondered if he'd make it at all. It had happened before: Carl had caught up with him on the way, sometimes waiting on the first corner from school and intercepting him. Luckily it hadn't been so severe that he had to go home and fix himself. It was usually nothing more than a creased shirt or a cut or a few bruises, things he could easily hide.

Carl walked in front of him, blocking his path and forcing Jim to look up. He was walking with a laughable swagger and it was all Jim could do to not smirk, because he knew that would only make everything worse for him. He hated that such an idiot had such power over him, could scare him so much. Too nervous to meet Carl's eyes, he kept his eyes fixed on the ground. Make it quick, he prayed, make it quick.

"Where you going?" Carl asked, amusement lacing his voice.

At that, Jim couldn't help but look up in disbelief. He held Carl's stare and said, incredulously "Um, _school_. Where else would I be going?"

He saw the shove before he felt it – Carl pushing him backwards by the lapels and against the wall, and pinning him there like a parody of a butterfly on a corkboard. Every ragged breath that Carl took was hot on his face, stinking of mint and milk. He was too close, far too close, and Jim could see every pore and every eyelash. Carl pushed him further back against the wall by his collar; cutting off his airways a little and making him cough. But Jim knew that this was just the start.

"You're too smart for your own good," Carl hissed, his spit flying into Jim's face. "You're such a show off. Think you're better than all of us, don't you Irish?"

Jim didn't answer because they both knew it was true and, anyway, nothing he could say would be any help: Carl was going to do what he wanted anyway. But what he appeared to want was an answer, because Jim felt himself rise slightly off the ground, just slightly, and heard the material of his shirt begin to tear. The question didn't need repeating.

"It's – not hard –" Jim spluttered, his words coming in short breaths, "– to be smarter – than you."

He watched with some kind of grim satisfaction, despite knowing that it had been a massive mistake, as Carl's face slowly drained of colour and his eyes thinned with fury. They stayed like that for a moment, look at each other, before Jim felt himself drop. Carl literally just let him go and he fell the short way to the ground, landing awkwardly on his ankle and twisting it. He couldn't help the gasp of pain as he stumbled. A jolting sting shot through his ankle and he closed his eyes. Because of this, he didn't see the punch coming.

It was like a battering ram had slammed into his gut, and Jim doubled over immediately and cried out. He clutched his stomach and tried to curl up while remaining standing. But it was too much, along with the stabbing of his ankle, and he collapsed to his knees with a hard crash. Perhaps it was the stress that his mum had caused him with the invitations, or the sheer monotony of the beatings, but Jim was giving in faster than usual and Carl was annoyed for it.

"Oh, come on," He jeered and aimed a light kick at Jim's ribs. "Get up. You're usually a bit harder to take down than this. It's pitiful."

Jim just groaned and pressed his face to the floor, hoping that he'd be left alone if he didn't provide ample entertainment. But of course, he should have known Carl better by now. He heard the creak of bone and a quiet sigh, signalling that Carl had bent down beside him. Just leave me alone, Jim thought, for God's sake just leave me alone. He must have muttered something because Carl said, way too loudly: "What was that, Irish? I didn't hear you."

So Jim said it again, hoping with all his might that the other boy would listen to him. He ached inside his bones and his ankle was jarring with agony. He stomach was hollow and ringing with the force of the punch, and the pavement was cold on his cheek. Right then, in that moment, Jim felt weaker than he ever had done in his entire life. "Please; leave me alone."

Carl breathed out through his nose, a long whistling sound, and Jim felt the gust of it brush through his hair. He remained still, on the ground, waiting. He didn't dare open his eyes, partly because he knew what Carl's answer would be and partly because he prayed he was wrong.

The kick, when he came, was to his ribs. That was the easiest part to get to, Jim reasoned, and he cried out almost dutifully as the shock of it reverberated through him. He didn't, try to escape – he couldn't go anywhere – so he just lay there and drew his knees up to his chest in a ridiculous position. He was choking and sobbing at the same time, every new draw of breath dissolving into tears and coughs. He could feel his sticky tears tracking his face and rolling onto the pavement, and he didn't try to stop him.

_Someone come _

_Someone please_

_Help I'm dying _

But perhaps prayers can be answered, because there wasn't another kick, and punches didn't come raining down. For a brief moment of respite, Jim allowed himself the thought that Carl had left him. But there hadn't been the sound of footsteps getting further and further away, so he must still be there. Slowly, cautiously, Jim opened his eyes.

He saw the pieces of paper littering the ground, fluttering a little in the breeze but not taking off – they were too thick to be capable of flight. He saw the scrawled handwriting, thin and spidery and in black. He saw Carl, bending down to pick up a sheet.

"_James'. Party._" The two words were loaded with such sarcasm and contempt that they were almost like hits themselves. Each syllable was full of laughter and mocking, as if this was the funniest thing in the entire world.

Jim didn't dare speak, even as Carl turned back to face him and spat in his hair. He didn't say a word as Carl walked away, deliberately crushing his mum's carefully made invitations. He didn't even utter a reply when Carl called back that he'd see him again tomorrow, but not to worry about the party: he couldn't make it.

_It's okay_

_There's no need to come_

_I'm already dead_


	6. 29 November 1984

**29 November 1984**

* * *

The table was covered with sandwiches wrapped in cling film, bottles of lemonade and cola, tiny wrinkled sausages and chocolate digestives. Plastic plates and Styrofoam cups were piled up in the corner, balanced precariously on the edge. It looked, for the entire world, like a typical party scene – the bright colours, the safe falseness of the cutlery, the ridiculous amount of food. But there was one problem, obvious and stark as the sickly white sunlight that streamed through the threadbare curtains: there was only one boy present.

Jim blinked down at the assortment of food and cutlery, each as plastic and false as the other, and swallowed slowly. All that could be heard was the ticking of the wall clock and the muffled crackle of The Bee Gees – his mum had left the radio on. _Staying Alive _was accompanying his spiral into horror at the sight of the party lunch that his mum had so painstakingly laid out for him. He could practically see her, an hour before he'd woken up, scurrying back and forth from the kitchen with trays of food and bottles from the fridge. She must have saved up for _weeks_ to be able to pay for all this.

He felt sick with anger, and clenched his hand into a fist to stop him from hitting something. Why had she bothered? Jesus Christ, was she so dense that she actually thought he had friends? Why was she so content to simply ignore the fact that he was obviously a freak, just like Carl said, just like everyone said? His heart ached as he beheld the table, straining under the weight of his birthday feast.

The clock ticked down the minutes until midday, when he'd actually been born, and Jim glanced at it, wishing it would stop its progress. The unending ticking was grating on his nerves, and he knew that was just counting down to the inevitable time when his mum would return and find the food uneaten, the sandwiches not unwrapped, and the plates unused. As much as he was furious at her for going to all the trouble of making a lunch for a ghost party, Jim knew that it had burnt a hole in her pocket and she _had_ put a lot of effort into it. He could feel that awful thing nagging at the edges of his mind, the thing that he'd thought he'd crushed: the withered remains of a conscience.

The scream of the wooden chair legs against the floor set his teeth on edge as he pulled it out. He felt a little ridiculous, like a kid playing at being an adult, when he sat at the head of the table and surveyed the food. The air was weighted with inevitability – nobody was going to arrive, and the food had to be eaten. There was too much to justify one boy eating it in one go, but Jim pictured his mum coming home and seeing the sandwiches curling and the fizzy drinks going flat.

His stomach clenched at thought: she'd be so disappointed, and they would have to silently clear away the plastic plates together without looking at one another. Neither of them would mention it again, but it would always hang over them. The time that there was an undeniable display of how freakish he was. No matter how good his mum was at denying it, the fact that no-one had turned up for his birthday could not be ignored. Not like the knife under his bed, the strange statements he muttered under his breath, the dissected insects in the corner of his room. These things could be pushed aside, hidden behind her motherly smiles and excuses; but a party with no guests couldn't.

As he pulled the cling film off the first of five plates of sandwiches, Jim realised that he was doing this for himself as much as he was doing it for her: he couldn't have lived in the same flat as her knowing that she had no choice but openly acknowledge that he was a loser. As much as he despised her ignorance, and as much as he resented her for it, the only thing he couldn't stand even more was seeing her every day and knowing that she was seeing what Carl saw: an outcast, a freak. His heart ached when he realised that he had to do this just to keep up appearances – he had to allow his mother the small mercy of thinking her son was normal.

When he took the first bite his immediate thought was:_ I can't do this._ It was full of watery tuna, a grey and congealing mush of fish and mayonnaise, and it stank of the beach. The bread was chewy and covered in too much butter – Jim remembered too late that his mum often buttered his sandwiches too thickly – but the butter was overpowered by the mixture of tuna and mayo. It was slimy and slick in his mouth, like swallowing cold porridge with lumps in it. He swallowed it slowly and felt it slide down his throat like bile and resisted the urge to rid his body of it. That was just one bite; he reminded himself cruelly that it was just one bite of one sandwich. Oddly enough, his mental voice sounded just like Carl and that somehow spurred him to crush the remains of the sandwich into a ball, feeling the soft bread ooze through his fingers and the butter smear his skin with grease, and cram it into his mouth in one go.

Even as he moved his jaws mechanically, chewing it quickly and gulping it down in manageable chunks of barely edible fish and butter, he reached for the next one. Don't think; don't think; just eat; you have to. He found that it was easier if he didn't blink, and instead just stared at the multi-coloured balloons that adorned the plastic tablecloth, as he chewed and swallowed. It soon became a rhythm – chew, chew, swallow, swallow, breathe, pick up the next one.

The clock ticked past midday but Jim didn't notice, just slid the first plate away and pulled the next one towards him. His mouth was full of the taste of tuna and his lips were shining with butter. The mixture was watery enough not to warrant opening the bottle of coke yet, but he had to wash the taste of the sea away. Knowing that it was stupid – he'd get full up on the fizziness – Jim reached for the litre bottle and unscrewed the cap. He momentarily considered just drinking it straight out of the bottle, but then reasoned that his mum would think it was strange that none of the cups had been used.

With shaking hands he grabbed the tower of plastic cups and began to line them up with the same painful precision that he laid out his stationary at school. He bent down beside the table and twitched the cups a little until they were perfectly in line with one another, with only a few centimetres between them. For those few precious seconds, as he was moving the cups slightly left or slightly forward to get them perfectly straight, he could pretend that he was somewhere, anywhere, but there. All the world was those cups and the table and getting them right because it was the only thing that he had control over.

Once they were in a line, he stood up and sat back on the chair again. Leaning back, he lifted the large bottle and poured the coke, careful not to fill it more than a third because that was how he had to have it. He set the bottle down with a thud and grasped the cup tightly, bending the plastic slightly out of shape. He dared himself to down it all in one go, and tipped his head back as he drank, feeling the fizz sting his throat and needle at the inside of his mouth, like a thousand tiny pins. Like all fizzy drinks, it was difficult to drink without stopping, but he'd dared himself so he couldn't not do it now. How pathetic would he be if he couldn't even keep a promise to himself?

When the torrent of coke became a trickle, he slammed the cup down harder than was actually necessary and gulped thickly. He could feel residue liquid on his cheeks and dripping down his chin, and he realised that at some point it had dribbled out of his mouth and over his face. It felt too sticky for normal liquid because it contained too much sugar and he wiped it away with his sleeve. Dutifully, he poured another cupful but didn't drink it yet, instead stared blankly at the bubbles rising to the surface in streams.

He felt achingly tired all of a sudden, and his bones weighed him down, forcing him to sink into the chair and fold his spine into a curved L shape. Outside, on another planet, a cuckoo cawed.

Pulling the cling film off of the new plate, Jim counted the ridges along the edge and scrunched the cling film into a ball. There were fifty. He picked up the sandwich and watched as the jam dripped out onto the table. Each plate had fifty ridges, and there were three more plates to go. One hundred and fifty ridges more, he told himself, and then he was done. Biting into the sandwich and tasting the sugary sweet strawberry jam, Jim realised how bright it was against the pale bread and how bright the plates were and how bright the tablecloth was and how everything in the room was so bright, painfully so. He was in a freak-show – too many colours and too much sugar. It was like a caricature of real life, a parody.

It was a goddamn horror show, he thought as he methodically finished the crusts and started the next sandwich. And he wasn't crying, no: he wasn't doing anything but eating. See, that was the thing about horror shows: they were full of distorting mirrors. And that was what this was. So it only _looked _like the world was blurring and wavering – because this was a freak-show and he was looking into one of those mirrors.

* * *

Later that night, Eva Moriarty drew her knees up to her chest and clutched her elbows across her chest. The dimness of her bedroom allowed for the belief that her pile of dirty laundry was a monster, like something out of a child's fairy-story. And the thin curtains let in the palest moonlight, illuminating the stack of unpaid bills and last demands, but in the half-light Eva could tell herself that they were just paper.

And her bedroom door had a gap in the bottom which meant that a bar of light could shoot through across the floor, because the bathroom light was on. However, in the safety of her own room, Eva convinced herself that she had simply forgotten to turn it off, and the sound of her son was just a neighbour vomiting and sobbing simultaneously, as if they would never stop. Catching his breath in hitching gasps over and over. Yes, in the comfort of her room, as she had done so many times, Eva could pretend that Jim was a normal child and he wasn't doing what she knew she could hear.


	7. 17 December 1987

**17 December 1987**

* * *

We last left Jim Moriarty at the young age of nine – already having witnessed the horrific truth of hatred and the depth of prejudice. As the author, I may have been staving off the later years of Jim's childhood so as to save him some of the little dignity he had left. Because is there any dignity to be had in his inevitable decline into spite and psychopathy? Where is the honour in a premeditated murder, meticulously formed and ironed out upon each visitation?

Surely Jim deserves some fairness, some goodness, after the cruelty so callously doled out to him. His should be a story of redemption and inspiration – I would love to report that he rose above the bullying and became a good person. However, as the author, it is my solemn duty to record what happened to the little boy who sat at the back of a classroom in Brighton. A little boy who remembered bars of light slicing through endless fathoms of water as he sank to the bottom of the swimming pool. It falls to me to tell you, reader, what he was driven to do.

Hervey Cleckley, the author of one of the earliest books on psychopathy, would argue that psychopaths don't follow a life plan, and that they have no end goal to their existence. But if someone was to chronicle Jim's thought processes from his dreadful ninth birthday, noting down every dark desire and violent wish, they would see that Cleckley was wrong: it would be quite clear that the telos of Jim Moriarty's life, his be-all-end-all, was to rid the world of Carl Powers. At some unknown point, Jim's fantasies transitioned from _if _to _when; _from _what if _to _how. _

It is a rather unknown fact that a particular vicious strain of bacterium grows on household foods of low acidity: clostridium botulinum. It causes paralysis and is virtually undetectable, especially when it's not being looked for. And why would anyone look for it on the body of an unfortunate boy who drowned in a tragic accident? Such an unfortunate thing, people would murmur. Such a loss for his parents. Wasn't Carl Powers such a _nice _boy?

The telos had been achieved, but I'm getting ahead of myself. First, I need to tell you about the day Jim discovered that the people in his life were willing to ignore even the most obvious signals. And this, for the first time in his life, could work in his advantage.

* * *

As is wont of time, it passed. Jim didn't feel he changed with the passing of every day, but people who knew of him (because people only ever knew_ of _Jim Moriarty, they never _knew_ him) said that he became more volatile and jaded. He pushed younger children over in the playground, kicked the football over the fence at break-time, muttered rude comments just loud enough for insecure girls to hear.

In himself, Jim simply felt that he saw things as they were: there was nothing wrong with causing a little pain to get to the top. If people were horrible to him, shouldn't he just be horrible back? Didn't the Bible, that hateful black book embossed with a gold cross that they read from every assembly, say "_treat others as you yourself would be treated"_? So Jim was just following Jesus' teachings when he pulled this little girl's pigtails, or tripped up that boy so he skinned his knees on the gravel.

But one thing didn't change: Carl Powers. Like a cliff-face next to a raging sea, Carl wasn't worn down by Jim's sudden 260 degree transformation. Actually, he didn't see much of it. He and his friends hung out in the corner of the field, out of sight of the playground, and never witnessed Jim's acts of violence. To Carl, Jim was still just a weedy foreigner with a stupid accent. And despite Jim's sudden incline in cruelty, he couldn't bring himself to stand up to his long-time tormentor. He still hung his head when he entered the classroom; he still didn't speak in class out of fear of fuelling the hurtful whispers; he was still the victim.

Mrs Lynch had moved up the school with her class, determined to carry them through their primary education like a scrawny eagle, watching over them as they grew and progressed. As she did when they were eight years old, she allowed her gaze to sweep over Jim's cut lip and bruised face. It wasn't her business, she told herself. He should stand up for himself; boys will be boys; it's character building. She recycled so many empty phrases to herself that she felt like a mass-produced leaflet.

"James," Mrs Lynch kept her eyes on her pile of papers and straightened the top one – Stanley Hopkins had apparently got an A. In the three years she'd taught him, not once had Mrs Lynch said his name correctly, and Jim had long since given up correcting her out loud. She only afforded him a tight-lipped smile and said _yes _in a patronizingly patient way. So, he'd given up and instead only corrected her in his head. _It's Jim you stupid bitch._

"Yes, Miss?"

She kept her gaze fixed on the papers. That was another thing Jim noticed about her: she never met his eyes. Maybe it was their unsettling blackness, and the fact that they always held wordless anger. Maybe it was a kind of apology for that first time three years ago, when she'd seen Carl holding Jim up by the collar, and for every time after that. "I heard that you pushed Emma over." Her tone was accusing and they both knew she'd already made up her mind – there was no other side to this story. It didn't matter that Carl had told Jim that if he didn't give him five pounds, he'd get a beating. And it didn't matter that Emma Silver was the richest girl in the year and she'd refused to give Jim the money even when he'd asked politely, so he'd had no other choice.

"Yes, Miss, I did. But –"

"You know what the punishment is for bullying, James." Mrs Lynch's voice was stern, and she twitched one of her pencils so that it was exactly in line with the edge of the desk. Jim wanted to knock it out of line. Straighten, _swish; _straighten, _swish. _See how it feels, Miss? Why can't you _see_? "A week's detention and it's _another_ note home to your mother."

Unable to contain his fury, Jim clenched his hands into fists and shoved them into his pockets so she wouldn't see that he was literally shaking with rage. A note home meant no pocket money and a "talk". Oh, Jim, you know it's wrong to hit. You have to be a good boy. And he would nod and say yes, he understood, and he was sorry. It wouldn't happen again. But she wasn't to worry, because he was okay. Lies, lies, lies.

He remembered something he'd read once about a man who'd had neurosurgery – when his brain was poked in a certain place, he'd suddenly started talking a completely new language. That was like his life, Jim thought: Carl poked him and out spewed lies.

Jim nodded in reply to Mrs Lynch, his lips pressed tightly together. He bit back the retorts that he wanted to yell at her, knowing it would do no good. To her, bullying was only bullying if you could see it. A bruise only counted if someone reported it. Tears unheard were tears unshed. She was pleased with his trivial attack on Emma – it meant that she had another excuse to turn a blind eye to what she'd been ignoring for the past three years, and twist Jim into the bad guy to justify her lack of action to herself. Seeing him as the villain, not the victim, helped her to sleep at night.

"Say, 'yes Miss.'"

"Yes Miss." His voice came through gritted teeth, and he couldn't look at her. There were pencil shavings littering her desk – little flecks of black on an otherwise pristine table – but Mrs Lynch didn't seem bothered by them. In fact, she ignored the imperfections completely.

"Dismissed." She raised a hand to wave him away, like a stray animal, not even affording him a glance. Jim supposed he should commend her: she'd managed an entire exchange with him without looking up. Often, in their numerous uncomfortable conversations, she had to look at him just once. It was only ever a quick flicker of her eyes, running her gaze past him for a few seconds, inventorying the classroom and hardly taking him in at all. But this was a new achievement even for her: she hadn't looked at him once.

Without another word, Jim stormed out of the room with his hands still deep in his pockets, his shoulders hunched and his muscles tensed as if he was battling an oncoming storm.

He started across the playground, pushing his encounter with Mrs Lynch out of his mind, deciding that the inevitable talk with his mum could be glossed over if he applied _Guilty Expression, _his pet name for a trick which he had learned to perform whereby he appeared to be sorry for something he didn't give a damn about.

His mother would play her role perfectly, as ever: the concerned and mildly irritated parent. Her tone would reflect her worry and annoyance, and she would use words like _ashamed _and _raised you better. _But he could see in her eyes that she would rather be doing anything but talking to him. His actions at school only confirmed her unsaid knowledge about him, and she hated to be proven right.

With every note home, every detention, his mother fought harder and harder to not face what was plainly in front her face. She had the amazing ability to make what was there into something she wanted to see, a skill which surpassed even Mrs Lynch's ignorance, because she had more reason to believe there was something abnormal about Jim. But no; her son was not dangerous, he was merely troubled. The skinned neighbour's cat? What on _earth _did her little Jim have to do with that? Her adeptness at the role of Blind Mother would make his part as the Apologetic Son all the more easy to play, because she hardly needed him to act at all to believe whatever he told her. They spoke their scripts almost to the letter with every repetition, putting on the show for her sake.

When he reached the school gates, Jim decided he would take a detour before going home. He'd found the local library to be a brilliant resource for his extensive research into taboo subjects. For instance, did you know that you should bury a murdered body nine feet under, instead of six, and bury a chicken carcass six feet? That way, if a sniffer dog catches the scent of rotting meat, they dig up a chicken and the police look no deeper than that. Always give yourself an alibi for the night of committing a crime – cinema, homework, family occasion – and tell someone. Then they can vouch for you if you get questioned.

More recently, his exploration had veered towards the biological. He found it fascinating that humans were just endless cells, constantly dying and changing and battling one another. But, ultimately, those cells formed something as complex and unique as the human body. Bones were welded together with fibrous ligaments; skeletons formed a delicate frame covered by layers of muscle like tarpaulin. Skin was stretched to the breaking point, so easily sliced and snapped back, encasing the infrastructure so precisely. Miles and miles of sinews and veins tracked their way through the anatomical design like pathways. It was like the world's most complicated machine. And, like any machine, Jim was entranced with how it could be broken.

He realised quickly, after trawling through pompous books with wordy titles, that the best way to kill someone undetected was through what he had dubbed to be _elegant_ warfare. A knife to the throat, a shove off a building, was too risky. It could be traced. But ground glass in a cup of tea? Carbon monoxide poisoning in a contained room? It could be put down to an unfortunate accident. And it was far more poetic, he felt, to have someone's own body rebel against them. For someone to die choking on poisoned air, or their trachea shredding as it was pierced with tiny shards of glass.

Carl, Jim decided, was going to receive that kind of carefully planned death. There would be abhorrence in the arrangement of details, repulsion in the revenge. The structured undertaking of Carl's demise would embody Jim's hatred for him, because each second would be mapped out – every painful detail would be carefully accounted for and thought through. His attention to detail wouldn't reflect that Jim cared about Carl in the slightest; rather it would show that he cared about Carl's _death. _There was a big difference.

He wanted the suffering to be strung out, the fear to ratchet, as the other boy realised that he was going to die. What was that stupid phrase? Ah, yes: hate the sin and not the sinner. Jim felt that this was applicable here. Love the death, not the dead. The planning of the event was what he obsessed over, it just so happened that the event was going to happen to Carl. Of course, too, it was happening _because _of Carl, because he deserved it. Funny how those things happened: life was a circle.

The Jubilee Library was a short walk from school, and Jim could probably have walked there with his eyes closed. It had been a safe-haven a few months ago when Carl and a few of his homogenized friends had waited for him at the school gates, given him a few minutes head-start, and chased him down the high street. The sound of his feet slamming against the pavement had matched the erratic pace of his heart, almost drowning out the cries of _get him _and the harsh mocking of his accent. When he'd reached the large wooden doors he shoved them open and stumbled across the plush carpet, breathless.

_Don't follow me in here. Oh God, please, don't follow me. _

They hadn't gone after him. Perhaps they'd lost sight of him, or realised that they couldn't very well shove him up against a shelf of books in a public place and punch him. But just because they hadn't come into the building didn't mean they'd left, and Jim had resigned himself to an entire afternoon spent in the library. He'd walked through the fiction books before realising that he didn't want to live in someone else's life. The titles tempted him with promises of escapism from the constant balloon of pain in his chest, but Jim had wanted to remain grounded. He was sick of running away.

So it was in this way that he delved into factual volumes. Theirs were large chunks of small print, boasting knowledge like aged professors in cramped black blocks of text. Whereas the covers of fiction books teased him with ambiguity, non-fiction books patronized him with the simplicity of their titles. The facts they laid out on pages unsullied with other children's jam and crumbs (because these books were read by _adults_) were stark and to the point, once Jim had navigated his way around their learned language.

He found an extensive work focused on biology, and hauled it over to the large reading desk. It was the 39th in a series of volumes on _Applied and Microbiology _by H.H. Huss. The contents wasn't alphabetised, so Jim spent that afternoon flicking to random pages to see what caught his eye. He wasn't looking for anything in particular; it was more that he was curious about what the book had to offer him. He'd stayed in the library until it closed, and the cleaner had demanded that he went home, his eye glued to the pages. Gallons of information poured into his eager mind, and he realised that he'd been thirsting for it. Never before had it occurred to Jim was a safe-house the library was, and his visits had become biweekly, or weekly, depending on the weather.

As per usual, when he reached the library, he nodded at the librarian and smiled quickly, before walking to the Biology section and pulling the same book down. He put it back in exactly the same place every time, so he knew where it would be, and carried it with both hands almost reverently to his table. He'd come to think of it as _his _table, because nobody sat on it with him. Perhaps there was something unnerving in his expression as he read intently, or maybe it was the intensity with which he swallowed the information with his gaze. Whichever it was, he had named the table, and the book, his.

As his routine dictated, Jim thumbed through the pages and stopped at a random section before skimming it quickly for key words of interest. _Tests for the presence of toxins_ sprang out at him, and he quickly reread the entire passage. The bacterium being discussed was C. Botulinum, and it was described as an _antagonistic organism _that was often found in soil and poorly stored canned foods of low acidity. It was given to lab mice, which both showed symptoms of something called botulism.

Leaping up, feeling he was onto something, Jim hurried over to the shelves and scanned them, well-practiced at looking quickly for something. He grabbed the first medical dictionary he saw and took it back to the table, dropping it beside the other book and flicking to B. The prose was extensive, and it took a couple of impatient page-turns, but eventually he found it:

_Botulism: A sometimes fatal disease which affects the central nervous system producing difficulty in swallowing, visual disturbances, and paralysis: often fatal. _

Sitting back, Jim blinked at the two open books before him. The answer to all of his problems was laid out with laughable conspicuousness, worded prettily by clever Oxford scholars and botanists, shrouded by exclusive lexis and clustered with scientific facts. But it seemed so easy, so attainable, that he hardly dared to hope it could be done. Surely C. Botulinum couldn't be gotten so effortlessly? All he needed to do was steal one of his mum's many canned foods and wait, checking on it daily. Of course distributing it to Carl would be an issue, but Jim thought that he would cross that bridge when he came to it.

For now, he was content to sit in the library and read further, allowing the half-formed plan to fester in the back of his mind. And, if you were to ask anyone watching him that day, they would tell you that he was smiling throughout the whole time of being there.


	8. 3 February 1988

**3 February 1988**

* * *

It's strange how we dig our own graves by the teaspoon – the smallest of compromises, the rounding-off of expectations and the settlings. Eventually, we come to expect the bare minimum from life, and it was in this way that Jim knew his discovery of Clostridium Botulinum would not change his life drastically overnight. He didn't, in fact, feel much change in anything.

Yes, there was a bacterium which could kill Carl – it was ridiculously attainable – but for some reason his unearthing of such a thing seemed almost anti-climactic. He didn't know what he'd been expecting from finding a permanent solution to his problem: some kind of indescribable joy, a zeal which defied wording. Like when people blandly say _you'll understand when… _Well, he felt cheated. He wasn't filled which happiness at the discovery, rather a sense of stoic justice. He was going to rid the world of the scummy waste that was Carl Powers, it was his duty, and there was no need to get emotional about it.

In his lack of enthusiasm there lay a worry – Jim should be happy about this, but he wasn't. There are expected reactions to certain things, in life: you receive a phone call from the police to say that they're very sorry, but your son has died in a tragic accident; you feel despair. You watch a boy drown in a swimming pool, you feel horrified. And yet, worse than the fear that something awful is going to happen, is the fear that you won't react properly to it. The terror that your only son is dead and you will feel nothing. With the tragedy comes a sense of reassurance at your own humanity – you are distraught, sick to the stomach, and that's _normal_. It's this _under-_fear, this unspoken dread that you won't break down in tears or scream when you're expected to, which haunts us perhaps more than the possibility of catastrophe.

And yet, there Jim was. He had found a way to get rid of Carl, and he wasn't pleased. He was facing the fact stony-faced. Carl would be gone (_dead_, for God's sake, Carl would be dead – why was it so odd to use that word?) and he would never be bothered again. But he was completely calm about it.

Maybe it was because he knew he had so much planning to do: the mould was still growing on the can of green beans that he'd stored under his bed. The inner rim of the can was layered with a thin carpet of fuzz, dark greyish-brown, which looked suitably disgusting. The smell which wafted from the beans, which had long-since shrivelled and wrinkled, caused his mother to pause for a moment and wrinkle her nose. But, for the hundredth time, her counsel was held – whatever was rotting in Jim's room, she didn't want to know.

He risked poking the mould with a stick. It was pliable – the tip of the stick sunk in and scraped against the metal – and a few small pieces of fluff flew off and floated through the air, like spores. He quickly crawled away and decided to leave it. No good scientist tampered with the experiment. Though he tried to cover the stench of mould with perfumes which he filched from his mum's room, it still pervaded the air and lingered in his nose. Wherever he went, the smell followed him as closely as his own shadow.

But it didn't bother him, not really, because it meant the C. Botulinum was growing as it should be. And, pretty soon, he could get it into Carl's system, coursing through his veins, seeping into his muscles, poisoning his blood.

* * *

"Hey, Irish, did you hear about the championship?" Carl's tone was snide – he knew that Jim had heard about it. Everyone had. When Mr Strickland had given the assembly, his hands clasped tightly together on the podium and his fingers occasionally tapping his knuckles, every year had been in attendance.

His voice had been nasally and grating, and Jim wondered how many times this dull little speech had been reeled off in front of his bathroom mirror.

"I want you all to remember that this is a big event for _everyone. _Even if you haven't been chosen to take part, don't worry – it's not the taking part that counts. It's the support! You can still do your best to help those special children who are going to be competing for our school."

Carl had been sitting on a plastic chair to Strickland's left, his expression smug and his arms folded. Somehow, he'd taken up so much _room_. He wasn't especially tall for his age, and he was far too athletic to be fat, but his presence was weighted on the small stage. At a first glance one might assume that he was the only one competing when, in fact, three other children sat in chairs next to him.

"You'll all be divided up into year groups for the trip down to London…" Jim had drowned Strickland's speech out like static, because he'd had a realisation.

It was this realisation that he called to mind when Carl's shadow fell across his book. It was a bright day, perfect for reading, and Jim had sat on a secluded bench in the corner of the playground and hoped to get the final chapter of _Allan Quatermain _finished before lunch-break was over. But Carl had found him.

"Of course I heard about it." Jim said, blinking up at him in the sunlight. "I was _there,_ wasn't I?"

Carl's face twisted into a frown. "Don't get smart with me, James," He snapped.

Jim shrugged and looked back down at his book, honestly not caring what Carl had to say. He reasoned that the other boy had about a week, if that, of words left. Then, thank God, nobody would have to listen to what he had to say anymore because he'd be dead. Until then he just had to let whatever rubbish Carl wanted to spout wash over him like a tide.

"Hey, I was _talking _to you!" Carl sounded petulant, like a child, when Jim ignored him with the weariness of a tired adult. In an instant the book was ripped from his hands and both boys watched it sail through the air and land on the edge of its pages, bending them.

"That wasn't mine!" Jim cried, leaping up and stumbling over to the book, picking it up and trying to smooth down the damage. "It was a library book!"

"Shouldn't have ignored me then, should you?" Carl mumbled.

Jim straightened up and whirled back around to face him. "_What_, Carl? What do you _want_?" His eyes weren't watering because he wasn't upset – he was furious. Leaflets and self-help books and TV programs said that if you ignored bullies eventually they got bored and went away. However it was rather with the opposite in his situation: ignoring him only seemed to rile Carl more. But not long now. Not long now.

"Are you gonna go to the championship?"

"What's it to you?"

Carl blinked. "What?"

"Why do you care?"

"Just answer the question."

Jim sat back down on the bench. "Yeah, I'm going." His voice was closed and he stared down at his crumpled book, hoping that Carl would get the message and end the conversation. He still had five minutes until the bell went and he figured he could finish it by then. But instead of grabbing his collar and hauling him to a stand or spitting in his face or pushing him onto the ground, Carl sat down next to Jim.

"What are you reading?" He asked, his voice quiet. Jim glanced at him suspiciously and flipped the book over in his hands so that the cover was shown. It depicted a tiger roaring, its fangs large and thick, its eyes wide. The title was emblazoned across the top. Carl frowned at it. "Allan Quar – Quar –"

"Quatermain." Jim interrupted, not looking away from the book. He drummed his fingers on the laminated paper

"Yeah." Carl agreed. There was a pause. "What's it about?"

Jim shrugged and was about to turn it over so that he could read the back, but instead he summarized: "There's this guy and his son goes missing, so he has to go across Africa to get him and he gets attacked and runs into these weird tribes and stuff. He's a hunter, and he, like, hunts wild animals."

"Sounds pretty cool. Like a nigger James Bond." Carl said, nodding to himself. Jim winced and wanted to correct him – Allan Quatermain wasn't black, first of all, and did people still _say _that? Wasn't it really bad? And anyway, Allan Quartermain was a game hunter, not a spy. But he remembered who he was talking to and reasoned that he had to treat the other boy like a dangerous animal – not question what he said, not argue. Just agree and don't antagonise him.

"Yeah," He said softly. "Just like that."

They lapsed into silence for a few seconds, during which Jim's mind floated to the disgusting smell of rotting canned beans and limbs flailing underwater. Despite the silence, it wasn't awkward. It was unusually amicable, the two of them sitting there. Carl kicked the ground and cleared his throat. "Did you try and get into the championship? Like, get on the team?" It was a query that should have been harsh, like a joke, but he seemed to be genuinely curious. There was no malice. No cruelty.

"Uh…" Jim stalled for a moment, remembering back to the endless endlessness of the swimming pool and the burning of his lungs. "No," He took a breath. "I can't swim."

"Oh." Carl seemed at a loss for a moment and swung his legs in unison. "Is that because of…?" He didn't need to say it; they were both remembering the same day – the dappling sunlight, the laughing of their peers, the shouting and begging. Is it because of what I did to you?

"Yeah."

"_Sorry_." It was barely a whisper, hardly a word, and Jim wasn't sure if he'd heard correctly. He looked up from the book and stared at the other boy for a few seconds. Carl was glaring at the ground, blinking rapidly.

"What?" He asked at last and Carl glanced up, his eyes filled with something that Jim had never seen. Something he couldn't place because it was so unrecognisable.

"Nothing."

They sat like that for a few more minutes, neither saying anything, before the sound of heavy footsteps broke the quiet. At the same time, both boys looked up to see Simon Boules running over from the football pitch. He was breathless and bent double, resting his hands on his knees and managing to speak in short bursts: "Carl – what are you – doing? We need you. We're getting thrashed out there." He gestured to the pitch behind him, a small patch of concrete designated to the football players across the playground directly opposite the bench.

"I'm _coming_." Something in Carl's tone had changed – he sounded impatient and angry. With a final swing of his legs he jumped off the bench and stood beside Simon, without a glance at Jim.

"What were you doing over here anyways? With that freak?" Simon asked, shooting Jim a thin-eyed glare as if he had deliberately coerced Carl away from the football match. Simon wasn't a ringleader – he never instigated any bullying – but he was a follower. Couldn't be seen liking the weird Irish kid. Social suicide.

"Nothing," Carl echoed what he had said a few moments ago, shrugging dismissively. "Just taking a break before I came over to win the game for you, and this little fag sat next to me. I was gonna tell him to get lost, but whatever."

Simon made a non-committal noise at the back of his throat and turned away, heading towards the other side of the playground. Carl stood for a few seconds, looking at Jim, who hadn't moved an inch on the bench. They locked eyes. Then Carl blinked once and spun away, following Simon hurriedly.

In that moment – that one blink and severance of whatever emotion had been building up between them – Jim decided once and for all.


	9. 14 February 1988

**14 February 1988**

* * *

"Are you all packed for your… uh… event?" Eva Moriarty was already half out of the front door when Jim dragged his large satchel down the stairs. It banged on each step and she thought it sounded oddly metallic but didn't say anything: it wasn't her place. She was going to be late if she didn't leave soon, but she felt obliged to fill her motherly role and ask.

Jim made a non-committal grunting noise and bent down beside his bag, righting and unzipping it. He reeled a little and even from her distance Eva could smell it: mould and the same stench that had hung around his room for the last few weeks. She frowned but didn't move closer as he nodded once and closed the bag.

"What have you got in there?" She asked, to which Jim shrugged.

"School project." A smile flickered on his mouth for a split second, but it was strange. A word sprang to her mind, and she was shocked: _empty_. As awful as it was, she knew she was right: her son's smile was missing something fundamental. But, as with every encounter, Eva suppressed her confusion and just nodded in response, as if"school project" was an adequate reply. As if it really answered her question.

"Alright, well," she started out of the door and called over her shoulder, "Have a nice day!" With that Eva put her strange son out of her mind and replaced him with her schedule. She couldn't let herself dwell on his smile which was devoid of happiness, and his funny-smelling bag and his lies. She couldn't let herself because she was terrified about what she would realise.

As she left Jim was already turning away and picking his bag up, his mouth a straight line, his eyes glittering a little with tears that he didn't allow to fall.

* * *

The school were going to travel down to London, to the same pool they used for swimming lessons. It would take several coaches to ferry them all there. The students congregated in the bus bay and divided themselves into year groups. The early morning sun streamed through the clouds dimly, almost apologising for being slightly warmer than usual, and all around students were puffing their cheeks out and removing jumpers.

Carl had tied his jumper around his waist and several of his mates had followed suit because that was what they did: copied Carl. Jim was boiling but didn't want to risk putting his bag down to remove his jumper in case his can fell out. His heart was thudding and his skin prickled – the can seemed ten times heavier than usual and he was painfully aware of his strap pressing diagonally across his chest. Was his face betraying his giddiness? What if they did bag searches when they got to the pool? How would he get it to Carl?

The ring of emptiness around Jim was wider than normal because he smelled a little strange – like rotten vegetables and must. Sure it was hard to detect, under the heavy smell of cologne which he'd obviously worn to mask the scent of rotting, but it was still there. Besides, the other kids silently agreed, it was a hot day and the freak hadn't removed his jumper: he must stink of sweat too.

"Powers, Carl!" The shrill call of Mrs Lynch rang out and the quiet mutterings among the students stopped abruptly. Roll-call demanded their entire attention, everyone knew that. Jim shifted his weight from one foot to the other and swallowed thickly. He hadn't been able to look at Carl properly all day for fear that the other boy would see something in his expression: medieval texts spoke about Death leaving a mark on those it affected. Would Carl look at Jim and see his plan scrawled across his face?

"Yes Miss?" Carl's voice was an octave higher than normal, unlike when he addressed Jim and his pitch shifted to several octaves deeper. He undid his jumper from around his waist and hung it over his forearm: the head swimmer couldn't be seen misbehaving. Everyone knew Carl was the best, and their only chance of winning was if he swam. The other children competing for their school were more for show, because the championship demanded that four students take part.

"You will be sitting at the front of the coach, as you need to get off quickly. But you'll be alphabetised which means you'll be sitting next to…" She paused and glanced down at her clipboard. In his hyper-aware state, Jim could've sworn he saw her tense a little before speaking: "James Moriarty."

James Moriarty. You will be sitting next to Jim Moriarty.

The world blurred and for a few terrifying seconds Jim thought he would collapse – the heat was making his skin itch and the can was weighing his shoulder down and his head was reeling. His knees felt weak and he couldn't breathe because he had to sit next to Carl who, in a few hours, would be dead. After everything, every jibe and shove and hit, this was where it ended: in a swimming pool on an unusually hot day. But first, oh, but first they had to get there. Together.

He managed to stay upright but stumbled a little which caused a few snickers – how could they not see that he was screaming? They thought he'd just lost balance. They had no idea. Nobody knew anything. He was completely alone.

"Aw, but Miss that's not _fair_!" Carl cried, his voice now becoming a petulant whine. He folded his arms and puffed out his chest a little. If Jim hadn't been on the verge of throwing up he'd have found it funny. Did Carl _honestly _think he was going to threaten a teacher? His self-confidence had taken on the quality of arrogant pig-headedness, and Mrs Lynch was clearly not impressed.

"Life's not fair Mister Powers," she replied curtly. Jim found himself agreeing.

She gestured to the open door to the coach with the tip of her pen and looked down at the clipboard again, hardly sparing them a glance. Perhaps, if she'd looked up for a few more seconds, she would have seen Jim readjust his satchel and wondered why it seemed to be dragging him down to a slight stoop. Maybe she would have asked why he seemed so anxious, and emptied the bag. The carefully-packaged open can of beans would have been regarded with disgust and confusion, but ultimately thrown away. And the murderer would have been without a murder weapon. But Mrs Lynch didn't offer up anything more than a curt nod and utter dismissal.

So Jim sidled past her, shaking violently, and stood at the bottom of the coach steps. Carl had walked up them two at a time and was already sitting in the window seat, swinging his legs casually. He looked resigned to spending a few hours next to Irish, but Jim could imagine that he was relieved that he'd been forced to do so: _Nah, I didn't wanna sit next to that loser. Lynch made me._ Jim wondered how he'd look if he knew he was going to die soon.

"Go on _James_," Someone shoved him roughly from behind and Jim's calves hit the bottom step sharply. He tripped his way up the stairs without turning around to see who it had been. Their tone was sharp and their push was harsh – did it matter who it was? They were all the same. He hated each and every single one of them.

Keeping his eyes fixed to the floor, Jim shuffled to his seat and swung his bag off, setting it down cautiously. He put his hands together on his lap and linked his fingers together, twisting them and sending small twinges through his nerves. Anything to distract him from Carl, who was glaring at the front of the coach with a stoic expression of quiet anger. Oh God – they weren't going to talk, were they?

Jim shifted in his seat and bent down to his bag, carefully extracting _She and Allan _and leaning back slowly. He felt as though every move he made was being watched by a predator, and every one of his actions was calculated and precise to compensate for it. He opened the book to where he'd marked and began reading, hardly focusing on the words, so as to deter Carl from any attempts at a conversation or attack.

Jim could feel Carl's eyes burning into him as the engine rumbled and a low chatter started up among the students. He didn't want to look up and hoped that the other boy would stop staring but, as they started on their way, he felt the gaze staying fast. Minutes past and Jim realised he'd read a whole page and not taken a word in. Slamming the book shut he looked up sharply.

"_What_?" He snapped. "What do you want?"

Carl looked shocked for a moment, and glanced around. He clearly thought that he could hide behind the general voices, mask the fact that he was talking to the pariah. But why did he even _care_? Jim couldn't help but think he had some malicious ulterior motive, but couldn't for the life of him work out what it was. After a few moments he replied: "What're you reading?"

Jim blinked at him and considered not replying and returning to his book. But there was that look in Carl's eyes again – the same one that had been there at the bench: curiosity. Genuine, open, almost child-like questioning. He seemed to honestly want to know and, for a moment, Jim could forget the years of bullying. It was as if Carl was two people, but he was only nice when nobody was around. And couldn't Jim give him this, just this small mercy, before he killed him?

"_She and Allan. _You remember that book I was reading the other day?" He hardly paused for a response, and Carl didn't offer any reply. "It's the sequel. Allan Quartermain wants to contact ghosts so he meets with this weird witch-doctor but then they get involved with a bunch of cannibals. I just got to the good bit." He glanced pointedly down at the cover, but Carl didn't get the hint. He looked out of the window but addressed Jim.

"D'you reckon all that's real? Ghosts and stuff?" His voice was quiet.

"Dunno. Maybe." Jim shrugged. He didn't like to think about life after death, because the idea of Carl as a ghost was awful. Carl would be dead and therefore he'd be gone – there was nothing beyond that. There couldn't be, or this would all be pointless.

"I hope it is." Carl continued pensively. There was a pause. "'Cause I want my mum to be happy."

"Oh." Jim drew a blank and watched Carl as his mouth twisted awkwardly, pressing his lips together hard. He was still staring out of the window stubbornly. "I'm, uh, sorry."

"Nah, don't be." His rough tone suggested something opposed to his careless words. "It happened ages ago – I was just a kid. Like, five or six." He raised his shoulders in a half-hearted shrug. "Cancer. My dad said she'd've been okay if it hadn't got into her blood." Jim wanted to interrupt – tell him that it was okay, he didn't have to say anything, but Carl was continuing. "He took it pretty hard; my dad. Never the same afterwards." A hollow chuckle. "Guess that's why he…" But that seemed to be the cut-off point, and his voice trailed off. Jim's curiosity was aroused: that was why he _what_?

"I don't know my dad." Jim said, almost as if to console his enemy. "He used to hang around and knock my mum about, but he scarpered after she threatened him with the police. Tosser."

Carl turned away from the window and looked at him. "Yeah? Did he ever hit you?"

Jim shuffled awkwardly and cocked his head to the side. "Sometimes. S'why mum made him leave. She said he could beat her to a pulp if he wanted, but she didn't want him hurting me." He smiled a little, to break the tension, and they lapsed into silence.

Jim returned to his book but, as he looked down, he frowned. Carl's arms were bare, his jumper discarded on the floor, and to the untrained eye his skin was pale. But Jim recognised the slight discolouring of healing bruises – he'd had to see it on his own skin enough times. There were various patches on his arm of grey and purple, hardly noticeable. And suddenly Carl's unfinished sentence made sense.

They lapsed into silence: Carl stared avidly at the motorway, and Jim read but didn't really take in what he was looking at. His mind was focused on getting the mould to Carl – he couldn't very well pin him down and shove it down his throat. It needed to get into his bloodstream, and Jim had no idea how.

The silence was broken momentarily by a rapid scratching sound, and he looked up. Carl was scratching the inside of his marked arm and flakes of skin were coming off: he had eczema. The smile that spread across Jim's face was too wide and his eyes sparkled. Perfect.

They didn't speak again until the coach came to a halt.

"I have to –" Carl began, not finishing.

"It's alright." Jim said, coldly, packing his book away gently so as not to disturb the can. "I get it." They couldn't be seen talking, or even spending more than the necessary amount of time with each other. Besides, Jim needed space to be able to get the mould to Carl. If he had eczema, then he had to have cream for it. And a small pinch of mould was all that was needed.

Jim got to his feet and exited the bus quickly. He didn't need to go into the changing rooms – that was only for the competitors – but he could always fake needing the toilet and slip into the main changing room. Carl would need to put more cream on midway through the championship, because the water would wash it off. That gave Jim an hour window in which he could get the mould into the cream. Simple.

"Mrs Lynch, can I use the toilet?" Jim asked as the teacher exited the coach. She had hardly gotten to the bottom of the steps and she sighed exaggeratedly.

"Alright James, but meet us at the viewing seats afterwards. You don't want to miss anything." She said to his back – he'd already turned away. If she'd had the energy, she'd have scolded him for leaving before she'd finished talking. But, in truth, it was James Moriarty and she despised talking to him. The less contact she had with him the better.

As Mrs Lynch explained to the protesting receptionist that the small skinny boy was with the school for the championship, Jim stormed to the changing rooms and locked himself in the nearest cubicle, huddling in the corner of the small space and waiting. Someone had graffiti-ed _Kenneth sux! _on the wall, and Jim couldn't help but wonder if Kenneth had used this toilet and seen it. As the door to the changing room swung open and raised voices and laughter rang out, he gripped the strap on his bag so tightly that his nails dug a little into his skin. And waited.

"You nervous?" That was Ben Russell, Jim recognised his slight lisp. Never one to instigate bullying, Ben had always sniggered when Jim was pushed over and laughed out loud as Carl and his friends chased him. He was a mindless sheep, but nothing more.

"Nah," Jim froze at Carl's arrogant voice. "S'gonna be easy. They're a bunch of idiots, this lot. I've swum against St. Mary's before. They're spastics."

Ben laughed and they went quiet. There was the rustling of clothes and the unzipping of trousers. Jim swallowed thickly – if they found him in there now they'd accuse him of being a queer and spying. And there were two of them. It wasn't until there was the snap of waistbands and patter of bare feet that he breathed out a little, and the door which led to the pool swung open and banged shut. Jim counted to fifty before coming out. They were gone.

Carl's bag was instantly recognisable: a large black rucksack hung on the farthest peg. His clothes were folded underneath it and Jim had the sudden childish urge to mess them up. But he left them untouched and put his satchel down to open the bag. He was careful to rifle through the contents, paranoid that Carl would notice a single thing out of place. An extra pair of socks, a towel, a pair of goggles, a lunch box. Eventually, buried at the bottom, Jim's hand gripped a cylinder piece of plastic. He withdrew it and found himself looking at a small tub of white cream.

Taking a deep breath he unscrewed the lid. It was unmarked but what else could it be? He bent down and put the cream on the floor beside him, reaching into his own bag for the mouldy can. It stank when he opened it – the smell hit him with full force – and he pressed his lips together tightly to stop himself from inhaling it. Dipping his hand into the plastic bag, he scraped some of the mould from the edge of the can and it sat on the end of his finger, a grey-green lump of fuzz. Wrinkling his nose, Jim rubbed it onto the edge of Carl's cream and mixed it with his finger until the mould was hidden by whiteness.

At lightning speed, he screwed the lid of the cream back on, put it into Carl's rucksack and hung the rucksack up. Then he closed his Ziploc plastic bag and put it into his satchel. His heart was hammering and he swayed when he got to his feet.

A glance at his watch told him that he'd only taken five minutes: the competition was just about to start. Carl was going to put the cream on in fifty-five minutes. In about an hour and a half, he would be dead.

The changing room spun and Jim stumbled to the toilet again and gripped the edge of the bowl as he threw up a thin stream of stringy bile – he hadn't eaten anything to warrant vomit. He closed his watering eyes as his throat burned and he retched again and again. After taking a few shuddering breaths, he managed to stand and walk to the mirror. He was pale and sickly-looking – his dark eyes were sunken and his black hair was messy and windswept. He blinked and looked away from his reflection, taking a long drink from the tap and spitting the water out into the sink.

"Come on now, _James_." He hissed to himself. "Get a grip. What are you, some sort of wuss? You have to do this." He stood there for a few moments before smoothing the front of his shirt down and exiting the changing room through the front entrance, entering the foyer again. The receptionist glared at him but he hardly glanced in her direction, instead heading for the stairs that led to the viewing seats.

The climb made his weak legs ache and he sat down with a thump on the closest seat. The competitors were already lined up on the edge of the pool and the whole place stank of chlorine, which Jim was thankful for in case someone caught a whiff of the mould. The water reflected on the roof prettily, because of the sunlight, and he watched the light dance instead of looking at Carl. The instructor was giving them a pep talk, which Jim tuned out. Not long now. The wall was half-covered with a massive clock that clicked loudly each passing minute.

A whistle shattered the anticipating silence shrilly and suddenly Jim's peers were leaping to their feet as Carl and Ben dived into the water simultaneously, along with the other competitors. The sound of splashing forced Jim's gaze down to the water and there was white froth flying everywhere – he could hardly tell where the students were, let alone which one was Carl. But, judging by his peers yells, he was winning. _Go Carl go. _They chanted and cheered while Jim just sat still and waited, silently.

They all completed a lap, Carl clearly streaking ahead, and his classmates were going hoarse with shouting. Five minutes passed, then ten. Three laps. A short pause. Four.

The instructor blew his whistle again to call a short break, and the breathless students clambered out of the water. Carl was ahead and the race had taken its toll: he flopped onto the side and his whole body shook with the violence of his breathing. He was soaked and shining in the light, like a fish. He struggled to his feet and glanced over at the changing room door.

Jim froze. What was he _doing_? He wasn't meant to go back into the changing rooms until half-time, but here he was heading for the door. The instructor called over to him and his voice was able to be heard from even their height: _Where're you going_? And Carl's response, _I need to get some cream for my eczema, sir. _Jim gripped the railing in front of him and screwed his eyes shut. His whole body was quivering and his mouth was dry.

When he opened his eyes, Carl had gone into the changing rooms. It was too late now, Jim told himself. As he was breathing, staring down at the still pool, Carl was opening his cream. As Jim was twisting and untwisting his fingers, tapping randomly on his knees, Carl was putting the cream on. And, after minutes of visualising, he finally came back out. The instructor called for the race to begin again, and everyone lined up.

Was it just Jim's imagination, or was Carl walking a little stiffly? Was he shaking? Or maybe it was Jim's own fevered mind mingling with reality as he watched the competitors leap into the water on the sound of the whistle.

At first Carl was winning again, effortlessly shooting through the water in a blur of white and sickly blue, and for a moment Jim thought it wasn't going to work. Maybe Carl had decided against putting the cream on, or he hadn't put enough mould into it for it to work, or; or; or –

But then Carl stopped. It happened suddenly and for a few seconds nobody knew what to do, until he started thrashing. The confusion was palpable in the air and the other swimmers slowed, staring. Carl's limbs were jerking uncontrollably, like a possessed marionette, and it would have been funny had it not been so awful. He was slipping under the water and back up again, gasping and coughing. At that sound, the instructor snapped out of his shock and dived in, fully clothed.

"Everyone! Out of the water!" He shouted, and the other students doggy-paddled to the side and climbed out. They stood on the side of the pool and shivered, watching silently. Save for the splashing, the entire pool was silent. Everybody was watching Carl spasm and flail as the instructor made his way to him. But, as is wont of drowning people, Carl fought him roughly – his hands and legs were hitting out randomly and the instructor grunted as Carl's hand connected with his shoulder and pushed him away. It was clear by now that he'd swallowed a lot of water, due to his retching and vomiting up sticky liquid, but nobody seemed able to do anything.

"Timothy, call the ambulance!" Mrs Lynch said, breaking out of her mesmerized stare. Timothy Jennings leapt to his feet and ran for the door, leaving everyone else to stay stock still, watching the instructor struggle with Carl. He'd managed to drag him to the edge of the pool, but was unable to get him out because of Carl's fit. In an instant, the instructor lost his grip and Carl sank, still hitting out at random. He sank fast, unable to stop himself, and the crowd held a collective breath.

Jim leaned forwards against the railing and watched Carl sink to the bottom. In that moment, he swore that they understood one another better than they ever had done before: they both saw the endless endlessness of the water, intersected with bars of light and dappled with shadows of the clouds outside. They both felt their lungs burn and ache with agony as they struggled for oxygen – starving, craving, needing. But not getting. They both understood what it was like to realise that this was better: this empty world of silence and dimness.

Sitting there, Jim smiled down at his enemy and raised a single hand. Their eyes met through fathoms of water as Jim made an L with his fingers.


	10. 14 February 1988 - Continued

**14 February 1988 – Continued**

* * *

Mrs Lynch was herding the children down from the viewing seats, along with the other students from the other schools, with their other lives, where boys didn't drown in swimming championships. Everyone was staring bleakly ahead, not really seeing what was in front of them. Down on the side of the swimming pool, the instructor had swum down to Carl and grabbed him with ease. He didn't fight back this time. Dragging him to the surface, the instructor had laid him on his back and pumped his chest rapidly. One, two; one, two.

The paramedics arrived as the students gathered in the reception, running past them with boxes and light blue uniforms and professionalism: surely people whose job it was to save lives would save Carl, the students thought. After all, they had those big paddles that you shock people with and boxes with big red crosses on. They _had_ to save him.

Jim stood away from the groups. Mrs Lynch didn't stop anyone talking, or call for order, or do much of anything. She just stood with the other students and lit a cigarette with a shaking hand. Her eyes were glazed over. Everyone was whispering and jostling, unsettled, and every now and then they would shoot a glance at the entrance to the swimming pool. But nobody dared to go into the changing room to get Carl's stuff, because that would mean he was dead and that couldn't be true.

After a short while of standing alone, Jim walked over to Mrs Lynch's side and folded his arms. She noticed that he didn't seem in the same state of shock as the other children, but rather his face was a passive mask. His eyes glinted and his mouth was a straight line, but he didn't seem upset at all. When he spoke, his voice was quiet and revered, like he was talking in church.

"Mrs Lynch?" The question had an air of rhetoric, like he was simply phrasing it as a question to appear nervous, when in fact he knew she would reply – he was going to talk _at _her, and she would listen. There was something in his tone that echoed authority. For goodness sake, this child was _eleven years old._ And yet he exuded the same confidence of a businessman who had just completed a difficult task – oily, arrogant and confident.

"Yes James?" She asked, tapping her cigarette and focusing on him. Even in her state of shock, something about him pierced the reptilian section of her brain: run, it whispered, run.

"Will Carl be okay?" His voice was nervous now, and whatever she'd seen in his small stance was gone. Suddenly, Mrs Lynch saw Jim for what he was: a young, skinny boy with unusually dark eyes. He'd been a victim for years and now the main perpetrator of the crimes against him was in a fatal condition and he was only concerned for him. Mrs Lynch looked into his unnatural eyes, wide with worry, and smiled sadly.

"I'm sure he will," she lied in a patronizing tone, holding the smile. She'd seen the way Carl had been too still on the poolside, the way his sparrow-small chest hadn't moved despite the instructor's desperate pumping. The images were burned onto the back of her eyelids, and she could hear the hollowness in her own words. But why worry a child with the knowledge that one of his peers was dead?

An expression flickered across Jim's face for a moment, too quick to comprehend – annoyance? Disbelief? But it was gone as soon as it appeared, and he nodded rapidly. "I sure hope so," He replied with a strange Texan twang that implied sarcasm and mixed with his Irish accent to create a frankly ridiculous tone. Mrs Lynch opened her mouth to respond but she felt a hand on her shoulder and turned.

The paramedic's face was stony and he didn't let go of her shoulder as he led her across the reception to a more secluded area. His voice was low but the seriousness of his expression spoke louder than his words could: Carl was dead. His body would be laying there on the swimming pool side, stiller than he'd ever been in life, his lips sticky with bile and his skin slick with water.

Jim was frozen on the spot and he started to quiver all over. He clenched his hands into fists and unclenched them, gritting his teeth. Some of the other children started cry and hug one another – they hadn't heard the news, but they weren't idiots – but Jim just shook and jutted his jaw out. His eyes were closed tightly and he looked like he was in pain.

One of the other teachers walked over to him and gently put a hand on his shoulder. "Are you alright?" He asked, concern heavy in his voice.

Jim's eyes flew open and he darted forwards. Before he knew it he was shoving the door to the changing rooms open and running across the slippery floor, tripping on the dampness and stumbling over his own satchel. His knees slammed onto the tiled floor hard. There was a constant screaming sound, keening and high-pitched, going on and on. He couldn't see – he was blind. His eyes were shuttered by tears, but he could just about make out a pair of laced-up trainers sitting next to one another, neatly, still waiting for their owner who would never come.

The screaming stopped and Jim's chest heaving in greedy gulps of air as he struggled to a sitting position. He looked at the trainers and knew that he had less than a minute before someone came in after him. In one quick movement he reached over to the shoes and stuffed them into his bag just as the door behind him swung open. He threw himself face forward, letting his bag fall to the floor at his side, and sobbed loudly. "No, no, no, _no_."

"James, calm down." It was Mrs Lynch and, though she didn't make a move to physically comfort him, her voice was soft and lilting. "It's alright; it's okay."

"My name's not James, it's never been James, I'm not _James_." He ranted hysterically, gasping, hoping that this was believable: would they honestly think he'd had a panic attack because of a dead student? Then again, they had no reason _not _to believe it. And they were stupid enough. His trophy was nestled in his bag; safe.

Someone put their hands on his back lightly and Jim looked up, sniffing, to see the paramedic. He carefully pulled Jim up so that he was sitting on his knees. "There we go, son. Deep breaths. There we go." Jim breathed in for a count of five, then back out again, following the instructions. He had what he needed now – there was no need to take it too far.

"I know it can be difficult when someone close to you passes away." The paramedic said, quietly, fixing his eyes on Jim's. "But would you friend want you to be upset?" He paused and it was all Jim could do to keep from grinning – his _friend – _and shake his head instead. "There you go then." The paramedic smiled slightly and straightened up, pulling Jim with him.

Mrs Lynch watched Jim carefully as the paramedic left the changing rooms and heard him calling to the children outside: _nothing to see here, kids, go back to your coach_. There was only one reason he would want them all to leave, she reasoned: they needed to get rid of the body. Whatever that was out there, being lifted from the tiled floor, it was no longer Carl Powers. The cocky boy with a strange fascination with the military was gone, leaving Mrs Lynch with that aged old question of _where._

They stood opposite one another in the otherwise empty room. Jim's black eyes were unreadable, his mouth twitching slightly in what seemed to be – _but couldn't possibly be – _a suppressed smile. He bent down to pick up the ridiculous satchel and hung it off one shoulder, shoving his hands into his pockets and rocking on the balls of his feet.

He didn't say a word, and neither did she, because there was nothing to say: it had all been spoken in her rants at him about "being a bully" and his "yes Miss's" that had a ring of sarcasm to them.

Anything which either of them could say carried an air of triviality: no words could counter the tragedy that had occurred; nothing could stop what had happened simply being _something _that had happened_. _Like the swimming pool – it didn't matter that a boy had died there, that right now the paramedics were wheeling out a corpse; nothing would stop it being anything more than a was no way to speak it out of existence, and Mrs Lynch knew that this odd boy didn't need empty words of comfort. One thing that could be said for James Moriarty was that he only ever said things which needed to be said.

His Irish lilt broke the vacuum of space between them, and he looked straight into her eyes when he said clearly: "He never paralysed before. Maybe, if he'd told someone he had something wrong, this never would have happened." He paused and a pondering expression crossed his face. "Shame."

Mrs Lynch felt herself go cold as Jim walked past her and out of the room, the tiny hairs on her arms standing straight up. Because, to the casual observer, it seemed like Carl had simply had a fit. In fact, she didn't remember the paramedic telling anyone besides her that Carl had actually paralysed.

* * *

The coaches had left without them, but the receptionist informed them both that a taxi was on its way shortly. "They felt it better to get the kids back home, you know." She said, quietly, like she was sharing a secret with them. Her eyes were slightly hooded and Mrs Lynch couldn't help but feel she was eating this up – a gossip. "After _what happened._"

"Yes," she replied, curtly. "Thank you. We'll wait in the car park. Come along, James."

Only the receptionist saw Jim's sullen expression as he followed his teacher outside, and she thought it was such a shame, to have lost a friend the way he had. They both walked into the car park and stood side by side, leaving a distinct gap between them, and stared straight ahead. Anyone watching would have thought they didn't know one another at all, and anyone listening to their conversation wouldn't have assumed they'd both just witnessed a child die.

"I hate waiting." Jim said, kicking the ground.

"Some things take time, James," Mrs Lynch replied stiffly, pulling out another cigarette and lighting up. "The taxi will be here in a minute."

He snorted in the back of his throat, as if disgusted by the concept of hanging around for transport, and he said, shrewdly: "Some things can be sped up, if you know how to."

She paused. "That's true. But there are some things you _need _to wait for, because that's how life is. More often than not, there's a good reason to wait for things."

"Yeah?" He sounded disbelieving. "Like what?"

She shrugged. "So you can have time to do everything you want to do." She took a long drag from her cigarette until the tip glowed and exhaled slowly.

Jim watched her with mild intrigue and his tone was argumentative. "But there are some people who don't _deserve_ the time to do other stuff."

"Everyone deserves time, James." A second passed. "Everyone."

"Nah, I don't think so. Not everyone. Not always."

The taxi pulled into the car park and slowed to a halt in front of them. The driver gestured to the back and Jim got in, silently. Mrs Lynch sat in the front, partially out of courtesy, but mostly because she didn't want to sit next to Jim. They spent the rest of the ride back to Jim's house in silence, save the quiet hum of the radio.

* * *

When they pulled up outside Jim's house, Eva was already waiting on the pavement. She rushed over the moment Jim got out of the car, and enveloped him with her stick-thin arms, sobbing. She was wearing a threadbare blouse and Jim could feel her bones through it, as if she was starving. No wonder he was so awkwardly thin, he thought, with a mother like that. God – did she _know _what a cliché she was? Did she thrive on being the caring-mother figure when it suited her, as he drank deep of the revenge-driven psychopathic role? Perhaps she was playing up to her audience, thinking that Mrs Lynch could be fooled by a crying parent into thinking that he was normal. There was nothing dysfunctional in the family, but rather the issue lay with Jim.

"My boy, my baby, you're okay." She murmured into his shirt, and he couldn't help but think she was laying it on a bit thick: did she really care _that _much? He hadn't even been in the water for goodness sake. Or maybe she was just compensating for her sideways glances of disdain, her ignorance to his glaringly obvious problems, and her apparent lack of interest in anything out of the ordinary in his life.

"_Mum_," Jim struggled out of the hug and glared at her, at which point her face fell a little. "I'm _fine. _Jesus, I'm okay. Would you get _off_?" He felt a flicker of pleasure at her widening eyes – a tiny spark in comparison to the fact that was sitting in the back of his mind that Carl was dead – and smiled flatly.

He was facing away from Mrs Lynch and the taxi driver, though he could feel their gazes on the back of his head, so they never saw him raise his hand and place a single finger to his lips. It could have easily been mistaken as him simply scratching his face, as opposed to the universal sign for _be quiet. _He flashed her a wolfish smile and then he whirled away, dismissively, to address Mrs Lynch and the driver.

"Thanks _so_ much for bringing me back, Miss. I'm ever so grateful, Miss." This time his smile was broad and toothy, more for the benefit of the driver than his teacher.

"Come along then, Jim." His mum said, softly. She reached out to put a hand on his shoulder but paused, hesitating. Her hand hung there awkwardly for a few seconds, not quite touching her son, and she eventually let it drop limply to her side. She looked so lost that Mrs Lynch felt sorry for her and stared past Jim, completely ignoring his charade. Out of the corner of her eye she saw his look of fury, but reasoned that it was more important to help the other woman than it was to entertain the whims of an eleven year old.

"Are you alright, Mrs Moriarty?" Eva didn't reply, so Mrs Lynch continued. "If you'd like, I can take James to see the school councillor for the afternoon: she's going to be running sessions for the students who witnessed the… accident." The request was almost laughable: it was clear to both of them that Jim wasn't bothered by what he'd seen, but she wanted to do _something _to relieve Eva of that terrible expression.

The glance that Eva gave towards Jim was hardly noticeable, but it was there all the same: she was asking his permission. He leaped into the role of the good student not wanting to burden his teacher in one breath. "Oh no, thank you Miss. I'll be okay. I'd really rather just go and lie down actually." He smiled at her gratefully. "Thank you though. It's very nice of you."

"Yes, thank you." Eva parroted quietly.

With that he began to turn away to go into his house, swinging his arms, and Mrs Lynch shot Eva a pitying look. How lonely it must be to be her, Mrs Lynch thought as they drove away, and to be stuck on her own little island with her loveless child. The poor woman looked exhausted from just this short exchange. She wanted to comfort Mrs Moriarty more than she wanted to comfort Jim, who had just witnessed the death of one his classmates but who also, to the entire world, seemed entirely unbothered by it. And there was a lot to be seen in that.


	11. 15 February 1988

**15 February 1988**

* * *

The air in the hall was oppressive, like a weight pressing down on the motley group of people – girls with modified skirts and back-combed hair sobbing into one another's arms, boys trying to keep straight faces as they whispered to one another that _they _had been Carl's best friend, teachers discreetly handing one another tissues for crocodile tears.

In the middle of the back row, Jim sat and stared straight ahead. There was a seat free on either side of him, one of which he'd utilised for his bag and the other he had rested his leg on lazily. His knee was bent, and he was leaning on it with a practiced casual grace. Gone were the days where he was conscious about the empty spaces beside him – now he used them for his own gain. He surveyed the stage over the tops of his classmate's heads as Mr Strickland loosened his tie at the podium.

"As you all know," he began, slowly, "There was a terrible accident yesterday at the championship." A wail rose from the crowd and Mr Strickland managed to look even more uncomfortable than before, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. "Carl Powers was an asset to this school and he will be greatly missed by everyone who knew him."

Jim could feel his peer's eyes, heavy on him, but he didn't look at them. They were all thinking the same thing of course: not _everyone_.

His newfound bravado hadn't gone unnoticed by the other children, and those who had previously avoided him out of disgust now did so more out of reverence: Moriarty was the new Powers. His straighter stance carried with it an air of arrogance which Jim had always had – he'd known he was better than everyone at the school for years – but only just revealed. If he dropped a book he only had to count to five until someone picked it up for him, as opposed to when he'd had to count to three until someone stepped on it.

He smoothed down his gelled hair with the tips of his fingers as Mr Strickland kept talking about _terrible shames _and _coping with losses_ and wondered how much longer he had to listen to this. These people clung to tragedy like a life-raft: each tear was cherished, every memory was shared and nurtured, their joint grief bound them with black threads. This communal sorrow was their way of showing his grateful they were: thank God it was _someone else's _child, _another _kid who drowned. At least it wasn't _them._

* * *

Now, when Jim sat alone, he surveyed his playground.

Gone were the adventure books where he slipped into someone else's skin and lived a life where he could do amazing things without leaving his bench – he'd done them already. He didn't need an endless rearranged alphabet to live because he was already _alive. _Carl had been his morphine and he hadn't come down from his high yet, hadn't realised that he who seeks vengeance must first dig two graves: one for his enemy, and one for himself. And Jim didn't want to be buried alive. He would have to dig himself out eventually, by committing more crimes to dull the scent of chlorine and dull the guilt of an empty seat in class. But he hadn't seen that yet, and in the days following the swimming championship, he spent break-times in a constant state of euphoria.

On the day he saw Sherlock Holmes for the first time, he was watching the football match between Years Four and Five with a smirk that would suggest to anyone watching that he wasn't joining out of superiority instead of the fact he wasn't invited. But when someone messed up a penalty shot and their whole team rounded on them like a pack of dogs, Jim turned away. He didn't feel like watching a kid getting beaten up – it wasn't one of those days. Instead he chose to watch the other children, standing in packs and playing card games. Had he really wanted to be one of them, once? But they were so… _mundane. _Their conversations ranged from boring classes to the weather, for God's sake. Who _cared_? They were never going to leave a mark. Never going to achieve anything.

He scanned the rest of his concrete kingdom wearily, a muted butterfly surrounded by moths, and spotted something out of ordinary: a stranger.

He was thin and lanky – his limbs seemed almost too long for his body. His dark brown hair was a mop, curled in a haphazard way. Despite the warmness of the day he was wearing a double-breasted black trench coat, unbuttoned. Underneath, his white fencing shirt was obviously a size too big for him, and hung long on his spidery arms, but it suited him somehow – the material was thin and flowing, like a summer garb. Though his shirt was a bad fit, his grey trousers seemed almost tailored to his legs: they clung tightly all the way down his calves, extenuating his skinny waist and scrawny ankles. Even Jim, who kept his shoes polished to a shine daily, had to admire the boy's gleaming black lace-up shoes, cleaned so much that the sun glinted off of them.

The stranger was standing on the edge of the playground, talking to Ben Russell – Carl's swimming partner. The latter boy looked uncomfortable, not meeting the other boy's eyes, and he shuffled awkwardly on the spot. He muttered something, before gesturing over to the field behind Jim's bench. The boy started to say something, before shrugging in mid-sentence and turning away, as if Ben wasn't worth the effort.

Ben jogged across the playground and, as he passed Jim's bench, Jim reached out a hand to stop him. Ben glared at him for a few seconds, clearly biting back a snappish remark, before realisation dawned on his face: it was no longer social suicide to talk to Jim anymore. Carl wouldn't laugh at you if you were seen lending him your ruler; you wouldn't need to groan extremely loudly if you got partnered with him in Science. Jim wasn't contagious anymore.

"Who's that guy over there?" Jim asked, nodding to the strange boy.

Ben shrugged and cocked his head to the side. "Call's himself Sherlock." He grinned at the unsaid response – "I know right? Stupid."

"Why's he here?" Jim expected a generic response: with a name like that, maybe he was a foreign exchange, or a new kid, or someone's embarrassing younger brother.

"Carl," Ben said the name softly, almost reverently, as if that was explanation enough. Jim's face apparently showed his confusion, because he continued: "He's here 'cause he wants to know stuff about what happened."

"What sort of stuff?"

"Dunno. Stuff."

"Why'd he ask _you_?" Jim frowned as Ben shrugged again, and realised how accusing he sounded. "I mean, like, why ask at all? Carl died. Nothing to it."

Ben shook his head and looked over Jim's shoulder for a second, but didn't run. He just replied with, "Why don't you ask him? He said he's gonna be here for most of the morning. Now sorry, gotta go. Football." He darted past before Jim could say anything else, and sprinted onto the field, where Jim already knew without looking there was nothing but the dodgy-looking gang in the corner who stank of nicotine in afternoon classes.

Keeping his eyes on the strange boy, Jim jumped off the bench and crossed the playground slowly. Who was this guy? What did he see in Carl's death that nobody else, not even his wisp of a mother or the paramedics, could see? How clever must he be to have spotted some tiny flaw in the otherwise perfect plan? On par with Jim? The idea terrified him, and for all his cockiness and arrogance, he wondered if he'd met his match in this awkwardly-dressed drifter.

"Y'alright?" He called from a short distance, shoving his hands into his pockets. The boy glanced over, just a flicker of his eyes, and nodded once. He didn't seem to want to do anything else, not even move forward to greet him, so Jim felt the strange need that he was so used to imposing on others, and hardly felt himself, to fill the silence. "What d'you want?" A short pause. "No offence."

"None taken." Jim was taken aback by the boy's voice – he sounded almost _bored_. Even those three syllables rang with lethargy, as if he was dragging the words from his mouth and throwing them into the world with colossal effort. He waited to see if the boy would offer anything else, and sure enough he did: "What's your name?"

Though Jim had no real reason to suspect this boy of anything other than harmless curiosity, he felt compelled to lie. Just in case it somehow got back to him that James Moriarty was bullied by Carl Powers, and he was questioned again. He thought for a second. "Richard." Did it sound like he was lying? Was the pause too long?

But the other boy was already on his next question, clearly indifferent to the name he'd been given, and only having asked out of politeness. "Did you know Carl Powers?"

Jim swallowed but cocked his head to one side in a shrug, a mimicry of Ben before him. "Sure." The casualness of the word sounded false even to himself, and he felt he had to keep talking so as to cover the awkwardness of his attempt to sound normal. "Everyone did."

"Was he popular?"

"Yeah. All the girls fancied him. All the guys wanted to be him." Jim was proud that he kept the resentment out of his voice, but couldn't shake the feeling that the boy was interrogating him. Why did he care so much? Should he ask? Could he, without arousing suspicion?

"Why d'you care so much?"

The boy looked momentarily surprised, before looking straight at Jim with startlingly blue eyes. He had the odd feeling that the boy was seeing more than just Jim's outward appearance, and it was incredibly unnerving. Like he was being studied, calculated, and catalogued. "The truth?" It was rhetorical, and Jim didn't need to respond. "I don't think it was an accident."

"Oh?"

"I think he was murdered." The statement should have seemed overly dramatic, almost laughable, but it was said with such earnest and matter-of-factness that it wasn't. He spoke with utter conviction, and it was terrifying.

For a few seconds, Jim couldn't speak. "Why do you think that?" He managed, at last. He even managed to raise an eyebrow in disbelief.

The other boy opened his mouth to reply, but just before he did another voice shouted from the playground gate: "Sherlock Arthur Holmes!"

Jim's first thought was _Jesus Chris; that really is his name. _Then he glanced over the other boy's shoulder and saw a gangly boy standing there. The other boy rolled his eyes and sighed exaggeratedly, not turning to look at the second stranger. They were polar opposites: where Sherlock was thin and wiry, the other boy was slightly plump, though not enough to warrant calling him fat. His hair was a lighter shade of brown, closer to caramel than chocolate, and his clothes were far smarter than Sherlock's: obviously some expensive boarding school. Judging by the irritation in Sherlock's face, this new arrival was his brother.

Without turning around, he addressed the other boy. "Go _away _Mycroft! I can get _myself_ home."

"We are _not _shouting this conversation! Come over here. _Now_." His tone was that of someone who was used to being in charge, and Jim took an instant disliking to him. He glanced at Sherlock pity, and they caught eyes and shared a mutual look of sympathy.

"Just tell me this, Richard." Sherlock said as a parting comment, his tone echoing a little with the pride of a child who'd completed a difficult puzzle. "Have you seen Carl Powers' shoes around here anywhere?" He smiled flatly and, with that he turned away and headed for his brother, already tallying Jim up as yet another brainless school kid who couldn't help him.

Jim stared after him and wondered how many Holmes' there would be in the phone book.


End file.
